For Windows™ users: Unless you are planning on hacking the Slony-I code, it is highly recommended that you download and install a prebuilt binary distribution and jump straight to the configuration section below. There are likely to be links and/or binaries at pgFoundry Slony-I site for official releases, the first of which is expected to be Slony-I version 1.2.0.
There are also RPM binaries available at that site for recent versions of Slony-I for recent versions of PostgreSQL.
If you need Slony-I to do an upgrade from some elderly version of PostgreSQL to a newer version, or if you need a late-breaking CVS version, outside the context of a major release, then be prepared to need to build both PostgreSQL and Slony-I from source. The remainder of this section assumes this...
You should have obtained the Slony-I source from the previous step. Unpack it.
gunzip slony.tar.gz; tar xf slony.tar
This will create a directory under the current directory with the Slony-I sources. Head into that that directory for the rest of the installation procedure.
PGMAIN=/usr/local/pgsql746-freebsd-2005-04-01 \ ./configure \ --with-pgconfigdir=$PGMAIN/bin gmake all; gmake install
Slony-I normally needs to be built and installed by the
PostgreSQL Unix user. The installation target must be identical to
the existing PostgreSQL installation particularly in view of the fact
that several Slony-I components represent libraries and SQL scripts
that need to be in the Slony-I lib
and
share
directories.
The first step of the installation procedure is to configure the
source tree for your system. This is done by running the
configure script. In early versions,
configure needed to know where your
PostgreSQL source tree is, which was done with the
--with-pgsourcetree=
option. As of version 1.1, this
is no longer necessary, as Slony-I has included within its own code
base certain parts needed for platform portability. It now only needs
to make reference to parts of PostgreSQL that are actually part of the
installation. Therefore, Slony-I is configured by pointing it to the
various PostgreSQL library, binary, and include directories. For a
full list of these options, use the command ./configure
--help
.
Normally, it ought to be sufficient to run
configure
,
where --with-pgconfigdir=/some/path/somewhere
/some/path/somewhere
is the place where the
PostgreSQL program pg_config is located.
From pg_config, the
configure
script can determine the various
locations where PostgreSQL components are found, which indicates where
the essential components of Slony-I must be installed.
On certain platforms (AIX and Solaris are known to need this;
Linux does not), the compile of PostgreSQL must be expressly
configured with the option --enable-thread-safety
to provide correct client libraries.
PostgreSQL version 8 installs the server header
#include
files by default; with version 7.4 and
earlier, you need to make sure that the build installation included
doing make install-all-headers
, otherwise the
server headers will not be installed, and Slony-I will be unable to
compile.
After running configure, you may wish to review the file
Makefile.global
to ensure it is looking in the
right places for all of the components.
After determining that the PostgreSQL instance to be used is
installed in
/opt/dbs/pgsql746-aix-2005-04-01
:
PGMAIN=/opt/dbs/pgsql746-aix-2005-04-01 \ ./configure \ --with-pgconfigdir=$PGMAIN/bin
The configure script will run a number of tests to guess values for various dependent variables and try to detect some quirks of your system. Slony-I is known to need a modified version of libpq on specific platforms such as Solaris2.X on SPARC. The patch for libpq version 7.4.2 can be found at http://developer.postgresql.org/~wieck/slony1/download/threadsafe-libpq-742.diff.gz Similar patches may need to be constructed for other versions; see the FAQ entry on thread safety .
For a full listing of configuration options, run the command
./configure --help
.
To start the build process, type
gmake all
Be sure to use GNU make; on BSD systems, it is called
gmake; on Linux, GNU make is typically the
“native” make, so the name of
the command you type in may be either make
or
gmake
. On other platforms, you may need additional
packages or even install GNU make from scratch. The build may take
anywhere from a few seconds to 2 minutes depending on how fast your
hardware is at compiling things. The last line displayed should
be
All of Slony-I is successfully made. Ready to
install.
To install Slony-I, enter
gmake install
This will install files into the postgresql install directory as
specified by the configure
--prefix
option used in the PostgreSQL installation.
Make sure you have appropriate permissions to write into that area.
Commonly you need to do this either as root or as the postgres user.
The main list of files installed within the PostgreSQL instance is:
$bindir/slon
$bindir/slonik
$libdir/slony1_funcs$(DLSUFFIX)
$libdir/xxid($DLSUFFIX)
$datadir/slony1_base.sql
$datadir/slony1_base.v73.sql
$datadir/slony1_base.v74.sql
$datadir/slony1_funcs.sql
$datadir/slony1_funcs.v73.sql
$datadir/slony1_funcs.v74.sql
$datadir/xxid.v73.sql
The .sql
files are not fully substituted
yet. And yes, both the 7.3 and the 7.4 files get installed on every
system, irrespective of its version. The slonik
admin utility does namespace/cluster substitutions within these files,
and loads the files when creating replication nodes. At that point in
time, the database being initialized may be remote and may run a
different version of PostgreSQL than that of the local host.
At the very least, the two shared objects installed in the
$libdir
directory must be installed onto every
computer that is supposed to become a Slony-I node. (Other components
may be able to be loaded remotely from other hosts.)
The document you are reading now is a fairly extensive “Administrator's Guide” containing what wisdom has been discovered and written down about the care and feeding of Slony-I.
This is only built if you specify --with-docs
Note that you may have difficulty building the documentation on Red Hat-based systems due to NAMELEN being set way too low. Havoc Pennington opened a bug on this back in mid-2001, back in the days of Red Hat 7.1; Red Hat Software has assigned the bug, but there does not appear to have been much progress since then. The second URL below indicates that there is intent to address the issue by bumping up the value of NAMELEN in some future release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, but that won't likely help you in 2005. Fedora Core 4 should have the issue addressed somewhat sooner.
A pre-built copy of the "admin guide" should be readily available,
either in the form of a separate tarball nearby, or in the directory
doc/adminguide/prebuilt
See the INSTALL
file for a workaround for
Fedora...
Even though Slony-I can be compiled and run on most Linux distributions, it is also possible to install Slony-I using binary packages. Slony Global Development Team provides official RPMs and SRPMs for many versions or Red Hat ana Fedora Core.
The RPMs are available at Slony-I at pgFoundry.org. Please read CURRENT_MAINTAINER
file for
the details of the RPMs. Please note that the RPMs will look for RPM
installation of PostgreSQL, so if you install PostgreSQL from source,
you should manually ignore the RPM dependencies related to
PostgreSQL.
Installing Slony-I using these RPMs is as easy as installing any RPM.
rpm -ivh postgresql-slony1-engine-....rpm
If you want to upgrade the previous version, just use
rpm -Uvh
to upgrade it. But please remember to follow
the usual upgrade procedure, too.
The RPM installs the files into their usual places. The
configuration files are installed under /etc
, the
binary files are installed in /usr/bin
, libraries
are installed in /usr/lib/pgsql
, and finally the
docs are installed in
/usr/share/doc/postgresql-slony1-engine
.
On Windows™ systems, instead of running one slon daemon per node, a single slon service is installed
which can then be controlled through the Services
control panel applet, or from a command prompt using the
net
command.
C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.0\bin> slon -regservice my_slon Service registered. Before you can run Slony, you must also register an engine! WARNING! Service is registered to run as Local System. You are encouraged to change this to a low privilege account to increase system security.
Once the service is installed, individual nodes can be setup by registering slon configuration files with the service.
C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\8.0\bin> slon -addengine c:\node1.conf Engine added.
Other, self explanatory commands include slon -unregservice
<service name>
, slon -listengines
<service name>
and slon -delengine
<service name> <config file>
.