Question 37524 in Ubuntu Question posted in
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Problems running the "psql" command to start postgres – Ubuntu

To run Apache AGE, I built postgres 12 from source with the –debug flag enabled and followed the instructions given. Upon it being succesfully built (in ubuntu on wsl2), I tried running it with the psql command, but it kept giving an error.

I tried running

psql -U postgres

but that gave me the following error

psql: error: connection to server on socket "/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432" failed: No such file or directory Is the server running locally and accepting connections on that socket?

However, if I run

psql -h localhost -p 5432 -U postgres

I am able to connect to the server. I’ve googled for hours but I am not sure what the problem is.

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4

Answers


  1. 0

    It is because you are not connected to the database server yet. After you have created a database cluster using bin/initdb <db_cluster>. You can connect to database server using

    bin/pg_ctl -D <db_cluster> -l logfile start

    Note: For running these commands, you need to be inside the directory where you downloaded postgreSQL (that directory has many other subdirectories like bin, contrib, src, doc, <db_cluster> etc). Then you can launch psql command line to interact with database postgres

    bin/psql postgres
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  2. 0

    You are currently using the -U flag for specifying the username, but you have not provided the actual username. To resolve this, you can try using the following command:

    psql -h localhost -p 5432 -U <username> <database>

    Please replace the <username> placeholder with your system’s username and <database> with (default postgres)

    Before running the command, make sure that the server is already started using the pg_ctl command.

    pg_ctl -D <cluster_name> -l logfile start

    Note that you can use a simpler statement for connecting to the PostgreSQL database without explicitly using the -h, -p, and -U flags. This is because, by default, the connection will be made to localhost:5432, and the username will be your system’s default username. You can try using the following statement:

    psql postgres
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  3. 0

    This can happen due to a number of reasons. Aside from the other answers, you can try checking what WSL2 is using for the TCP connections.

    I experienced the same issue running without a VPN but as soon as I connected to the same VPN (in the specific location I was connected to) at the time of install it magically worked.

    https://gist.github.com/machuu/7663aa653828d81efbc2aaad6e3b1431

    Describes the issue I had the produced same error message on WSL2.

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  4. 0

    You have to start the server before running psql. You can start the server by running the following command.

    pg_ctl -D ‘dbname’ -l logfile start

    After starting server, you can run psql.

    This was the main problem why you were getting an error. The server was not started before running psql.

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