4 Before you can use PostgreSQL you need to install it, of course. It is
5 possible that PostgreSQL is already installed at your site, either
6 because it was included in your operating system distribution or
7 because the system administrator already installed it. If that is the
8 case, you should obtain information from the operating system
9 documentation or your system administrator about how to access
12 If you are not sure whether PostgreSQL is already available or whether
13 you can use it for your experimentation then you can install it
14 yourself. Doing so is not hard and it can be a good exercise.
15 PostgreSQL can be installed by any unprivileged user; no superuser
16 (root) access is required.
18 If you are installing PostgreSQL yourself, then refer to Chapter 17 for
19 instructions on installation, and return to this guide when the
20 installation is complete. Be sure to follow closely the section about
21 setting up the appropriate environment variables.
23 If your site administrator has not set things up in the default way,
24 you might have some more work to do. For example, if the database
25 server machine is a remote machine, you will need to set the PGHOST
26 environment variable to the name of the database server machine. The
27 environment variable PGPORT might also have to be set. The bottom line
28 is this: if you try to start an application program and it complains
29 that it cannot connect to the database, you should consult your site
30 administrator or, if that is you, the documentation to make sure that
31 your environment is properly set up. If you did not understand the
32 preceding paragraph then read the next section.