Forum OpenACS Q&A: wrong PATH for postgres following installation doc -PLS HLP

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1: wrong PATH for postgres following installation doc -PLS HLP
Posted by Yves Goldberg on 06/05/03 11:07 AM
I'm installing oacs.4.6.3 following the docs at https://openacs.org/doc/openacs-4-6-3/postgres.html

At point 3 (Set up postgres's environment variables); I follow the direction but when checking env I get:
====================================================
postgres@yasha:~$ env
PWD=/usr/local/pgsql
HZ=100
PS1=\u@\h:\w\$
USER=postgres
MAIL=/var/mail/postgres
LOGNAME=postgres
SHLVL=1
SHELL=/bin/bash
TERM=vt100
HOME=/usr/local/pgsql
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/bin/X11:/usr/games
_=/usr/bin/env
========================================================

Am I doing something wrong?
Thank for any help.

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2: Re: wrong PATH for postgres following installation doc -PLS HLP (response to 1)
Posted by Yves Goldberg on 06/05/03 05:22 PM
Found the solution.

for a reason or another .bashrc wasn't run when login.

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3: Re: wrong PATH for postgres following installation doc -PLS HLP (response to 1)
Posted by Jade Rubick on 06/05/03 07:04 PM
I had the same problem on Debian.
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4: Re: wrong PATH for postgres following installation doc -PLS HLP (response to 1)
Posted by Pavel Boghita on 09/17/03 01:25 PM
I modified .bash_profile rather than .bashrc and seems to work better. If I modifiy .bashrc and I log out and then back in as user postgres, .bashrc doesn't seem to be called in for some reason, but .bash_profile does. All this is happening in Debian Woody.
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5: Re: wrong PATH for postgres following installation doc -PLS HLP (response to 1)
Posted by Andrei Popov on 09/17/03 05:58 PM
.bashrc is used by non-login shells.  Your .bash_profile (login shell setup) must explicitly source .bashrc.

Something like this at the top of .bash_profile help, usually:

# source .bashrc if one exists
if [ -f ~/.bashrc ]; then . ~/.bashrc; fi

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6: Re: wrong PATH for postgres following installation doc -PLS HLP (response to 1)
Posted by Jade Rubick on 09/17/03 08:15 PM
We should put this in the install docs.
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7: Re: wrong PATH for postgres following installation doc -PLS HLP (response to 1)
Posted by Andrei Popov on 09/18/03 09:05 AM
Actually, current doc is ok -- .bashrc will be sourced by bash automatically when nsd runs as user nsadmin (but not as a login shell).

The ambuguity comes from the fact that with the changes applied to .bashrc only, and no sourcing of it in .bash_profile, yet checking the environment when logging in as nsadmin (running bash as login shell) -- changes don't get reflected.

Adding that single line to .bash_profile never hurts, and we should probably add that to the docs -- with or without it when nsd is started things will suddenly just work.

Another thing to add to docs could be a reference to bash(1) man page, as well as references to any other useful manual pages.

All the environment changes could also be made in nsd-postgres or nsd-oracle shell scripts (if they are still included in docs, not sure about it), as long as they are exported.

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8: Use /etc/profile-postgres.sh (response to 1)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 09/18/03 09:06 AM
Putting some of those environment variables in the postgres's users login scripts is just plain wrong anyway. As I've mentioned before, these are system-wide settings that you probably want be default in some system-wide place. See my Oracle install notes - the issue should be the same for PostgreSQL.

What you really want is a file called /etc/profile-postgres.sh or something like that. It should be something like this: 

#
# $Id: profile-postgres.sh,v 1.2 2002/12/24 07:03:13 atp Exp $
#
# Single central place for setting all PostgreSQL environment variables.
# Source this from /etc/profile.
#
# --atp@piskorski.com, 2002/12/06 14:03 EST

# For Debian PostgreSQL package:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/lib/postgresql/lib/
PATH=$PATH:/usr/lib/postgresql/bin/
PG_HEADERS=/usr/include/postgresql

## For locally installed from source PostgreSQL:
#LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:/usr/local/pgsql/lib
#PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/pgsql/bin

export PATH LD_LIBRARY_PATH PG_HEADERS
. /etc/postgresql/postgresql.env

Then do this in an appropriate spot in your system-wide /etc/profile: 

for script in  /etc/profile-oracle.sh  /etc/profile-postgres.sh
do
  if [ -e "$script" ]
  then
    . "$script"
  fi
done
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9: Re: Use /etc/profile-postgres.sh (response to 8)
Posted by Malte Sussdorff on 09/18/03 09:40 AM
Amen to that. For the record, SuSE uses /etc/profile.d/ for storing these kind of files and it is fairly usefull (as all files get sourced at system start AFAIK). Who is going to add this to the documentation ?
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10: Re: wrong PATH for postgres following installation doc -PLS HLP (response to 1)
Posted by Tom Jackson on 09/18/03 05:39 PM

Andrew,

Isn't it only _wrong_ until you have two versions of postgresql running? I liked your suggestion when you made it a while ago for Oracle install, but then I immediately installed two different copies of pg.

It seems that if you want to get technical about things, environment variables should be set per process, whenever a process is started up, or restarted.

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11: Re: wrong PATH for postgres following installation doc -PLS HLP (response to 1)
Posted by Andrei Popov on 09/18/03 06:28 PM
How about this -- core environment should be setup in user's non-login shell, especially if this is a daemon-like user (as the case of postgres -- it owns a service).

However, each instance of a service (e.g. eache separate postmaster process or aolserver proces -- whatever) should include 'tweaking' of environment as and when required.

For example, you may want to run 2 Pg's, listening on different ports (could be set as a env. variable and used in postmaster.conf), using different PG_DATA.  Yet they both may be the same Pg version, hence use the same libe (PG_LIB) and binaries (PG_BIN or whatever), ahve access to the same system binaries (PATH), etc.

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12: Re: wrong PATH for postgres following installation doc -PLS HLP (response to 10)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 09/19/03 06:43 AM
Tom, no, it is not. I haven't had to do that myself yet, but I've thought about it. For two PostgreSQL installs - or two Oracle isntances, it's the same situation - you want essentially two versions of that script profile-postgres.sh, one for each instance (or pass in a parameter to the script saying which instance you want, whatever).

Clients using one instance or another source the appropriate script. Your only decision to make, is if one instance should be the default - if so, source that instance's profile-postgres.sh from /etc/profile, and not the other. If you don't want any default instance, then source neither script from /etc/profile - now in order to use the database, each client must take a explicit action. But that action is just sourcing the script. This is way I said to put the settings into profile-postgres.sh, not directly into /etc/profile.

Having two instances changes nothing important - these are still system-wide settings that should be in a system-wide place. What you want to avoid is having the exact same settings hard-coded into lots of different places - put each in one place only, whenever feasible.

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13: Re: Use /etc/profile-postgres.sh (response to 9)
Posted by Andrew Piskorski on 09/19/03 06:54 AM
Oh, Red Hat seems to have /etc/profile.d/ as well, I didn't know about that. Debian does not though. Ah, it is used via a little loop at the end of /etc/profile: 
for i in /etc/profile.d/*.sh ; do
    if [ -r "$i" ]; then
        . $i
    fi
done
unset i
So that's good, there's no magic going on behind the scenes, it is just good old /etc/profile doing the work. Very simple.

(I guess nobody in the Linux world worries about /bin/sh vs. /bin/bash differences anymore, since most Linux distributions use bash for everything. That "; then" syntax won't work in sh, like you sometimes find on Solaris...)

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14: Re: wrong PATH for postgres following installation doc -PLS HLP (response to 1)
Posted by Tom Jackson on 09/19/03 09:04 AM

Thanks Andrew, I knew you had a good, I mean very good, explanation!