A few weekends, I had to play with postgreSQL on my Exherbo. The package was installed, but Pg needs some post-install init to run correctly. Since it’s not handled by the exheres, you’ve got a few things to do by yourself.

This is really important as it allows you to configure everything before actually starting the init process.

Install

Check the options, namely systemd but if you’re using systemd, it should be already enabled. There are a few pg-specific options, like hstore which can be of interest.

cave resolve postgresql

Systemd tweaking

PostgreSQL 9.2 dropped some options (namely silent_mode), which are still present in the provided systemd service file. Kévin Decherf and I tweaked the exheres a bit to make it support different service files, one for each version.

The patch is submitted, but not yet merged. In the meantime, you just have to edit your installed service file by hand.

Init

Then, the init part (as root).

mkdir -p /var/lib/postgresql/data/
chown -R postgres:postgres /var/lib/postgresql
su - postgres
initdb -D /var/lib/postgresql/data/

Now everything should be ok.

systemctl start postgresql