PostgreSQL can be built using the Visual C++ compiler suite from Microsoft. These compilers can be either from Visual Studio, Visual Studio Express or some versions of the Microsoft Windows SDK. If you do not already have a Visual Studio environment set up, the easiest ways are to use the compilers from Visual Studio 2022 or those in the Windows SDK 10, which are both free downloads from Microsoft.
Both 32-bit and 64-bit builds are possible with the Microsoft Compiler suite. 32-bit PostgreSQL builds are possible with Visual Studio 2015 to Visual Studio 2022, as well as standalone Windows SDK releases 8.1a to 10. 64-bit PostgreSQL builds are supported with Microsoft Windows SDK version 8.1a to 10 or Visual Studio 2015 and above.
The tools for building using Visual C++ or
Platform SDK are in the
src\tools\msvc
directory. When building, make sure
there are no tools from MinGW or
Cygwin present in your system PATH. Also, make
sure you have all the required Visual C++ tools available in the PATH. In
Visual Studio, start the
Visual Studio Command Prompt.
If you wish to build a 64-bit version, you must use the 64-bit version of
the command, and vice versa.
Starting with Visual Studio 2017 this can be
done from the command line using VsDevCmd.bat
, see
-help
for the available options and their default values.
vsvars32.bat
is available in
Visual Studio 2015 and earlier versions for the
same purpose.
From the Visual Studio Command Prompt, you can
change the targeted CPU architecture, build type, and target OS by using the
vcvarsall.bat
command, e.g.,
vcvarsall.bat x64 10.0.10240.0
to target Windows 10
with a 64-bit release build. See -help
for the other
options of vcvarsall.bat
. All commands should be run from
the src\tools\msvc
directory.
Before you build, you can create the file config.pl
to reflect any configuration options you want to change, or the paths to
any third party libraries to use. The complete configuration is determined
by first reading and parsing the file config_default.pl
,
and then apply any changes from config.pl
. For example,
to specify the location of your Python installation,
put the following in config.pl
:
$config->{python} = 'c:\python310';
You only need to specify those parameters that are different from what's in
config_default.pl
.
If you need to set any other environment variables, create a file called
buildenv.pl
and put the required commands there. For
example, to add the path for bison when it's not in the PATH, create a file
containing:
$ENV{PATH}=$ENV{PATH} . ';c:\some\where\bison\bin';
To pass additional command line arguments to the Visual Studio build command (msbuild or vcbuild):
$ENV{MSBFLAGS}="/m";
The following additional products are required to build
PostgreSQL. Use the
config.pl
file to specify which directories the libraries
are available in.
If your build environment doesn't ship with a supported version of the Microsoft Windows SDK it is recommended that you upgrade to the latest version (currently version 10), available for download from https://www.microsoft.com/download.
You must always include the Windows Headers and Libraries part of the SDK. If you install a Windows SDK including the Visual C++ Compilers, you don't need Visual Studio to build. Note that as of Version 8.0a the Windows SDK no longer ships with a complete command-line build environment.
ActiveState Perl is required to run the build generation scripts. MinGW or Cygwin Perl will not work. It must also be present in the PATH. Binaries can be downloaded from https://www.activestate.com (Note: version 5.14 or later is required, the free Standard Distribution is sufficient).
The following additional products are not required to get started,
but are required to build the complete package. Use the
config.pl
file to specify which directories the libraries
are available in.
Required for building PL/Tcl (Note: version 8.4 is required, the free Standard Distribution is sufficient).
Bison and Flex are required to build from Git, but not required when building from a release file. Only Bison versions 2.3 and later will work. Flex must be version 2.5.35 or later.
Both Bison and Flex are included in the msys tool suite, available from http://www.mingw.org/wiki/MSYS as part of the MinGW compiler suite.
You will need to add the directory containing
flex.exe
and bison.exe
to the
PATH environment variable in buildenv.pl
unless
they are already in PATH. In the case of MinGW, the directory is the
\msys\1.0\bin
subdirectory of your MinGW
installation directory.
The Bison distribution from GnuWin32 appears to have a bug that
causes Bison to malfunction when installed in a directory with
spaces in the name, such as the default location on English
installations C:\Program Files\GnuWin32
.
Consider installing into C:\GnuWin32
or use the
NTFS short name path to GnuWin32 in your PATH environment setting
(e.g., C:\PROGRA~1\GnuWin32
).
Diff is required to run the regression tests, and can be downloaded from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net.
Gettext is required to build with NLS support, and can be downloaded from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net. Note that binaries, dependencies and developer files are all needed.
Required for GSSAPI authentication support. MIT Kerberos can be downloaded from https://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/dist/index.html.
Required for XML support. Binaries can be downloaded from https://zlatkovic.com/pub/libxml or source from http://xmlsoft.org. Note that libxml2 requires iconv, which is available from the same download location.
Required for supporting LZ4 compression. Binaries and source can be downloaded from https://github.com/lz4/lz4/releases.
Required for supporting Zstandard compression. Binaries and source can be downloaded from https://github.com/facebook/zstd/releases.
Required for SSL support. Binaries can be downloaded from https://slproweb.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html or source from https://www.openssl.org.
Required for UUID-OSSP support (contrib only). Source can be downloaded from http://www.ossp.org/pkg/lib/uuid/.
Required for building PL/Python. Binaries can be downloaded from https://www.python.org.
Required for compression support in pg_dump and pg_restore. Binaries can be downloaded from https://www.zlib.net.
PostgreSQL will only build for the x64 architecture on 64-bit Windows.
Mixing 32- and 64-bit versions in the same build tree is not supported. The build system will automatically detect if it's running in a 32- or 64-bit environment, and build PostgreSQL accordingly. For this reason, it is important to start the correct command prompt before building.
To use a server-side third party library such as Python or OpenSSL, this library must also be 64-bit. There is no support for loading a 32-bit library in a 64-bit server. Several of the third party libraries that PostgreSQL supports may only be available in 32-bit versions, in which case they cannot be used with 64-bit PostgreSQL.
To build all of PostgreSQL in release configuration (the default), run the command:
build
To build all of PostgreSQL in debug configuration, run the command:
build DEBUG
To build just a single project, for example psql, run the commands:
build psql
build DEBUG psql
To change the default build configuration to debug, put the following
in the buildenv.pl
file:
$ENV{CONFIG}="Debug";
It is also possible to build from inside the Visual Studio GUI. In this case, you need to run:
perl mkvcbuild.pl
from the command prompt, and then open the generated
pgsql.sln
(in the root directory of the source tree)
in Visual Studio.
Most of the time, the automatic dependency tracking in Visual Studio will
handle changed files. But if there have been large changes, you may need
to clean the installation. To do this, simply run the
clean.bat
command, which will automatically clean out
all generated files. You can also run it with the
dist
parameter, in which case it will behave like
make distclean
and remove the flex/bison output files
as well.
By default, all files are written into a subdirectory of the
debug
or release
directories. To
install these files using the standard layout, and also generate the files
required to initialize and use the database, run the command:
install c:\destination\directory
If you want to install only the client applications and interface libraries, then you can use these commands:
install c:\destination\directory client
To run the regression tests, make sure you have completed the build of all
required parts first. Also, make sure that the DLLs required to load all
parts of the system (such as the Perl and Python DLLs for the procedural
languages) are present in the system path. If they are not, set it through
the buildenv.pl
file. To run the tests, run one of
the following commands from the src\tools\msvc
directory:
vcregress check
vcregress installcheck
vcregress plcheck
vcregress contribcheck
vcregress modulescheck
vcregress ecpgcheck
vcregress isolationcheck
vcregress bincheck
vcregress recoverycheck
To change the schedule used (default is parallel), append it to the command line like:
vcregress check serial
For more information about the regression tests, see Chapter 33.
Running the regression tests on client programs, with
vcregress bincheck
, or on recovery tests, with
vcregress recoverycheck
, requires an additional Perl module
to be installed:
As of this writing, IPC::Run
is not included in the
ActiveState Perl installation, nor in the ActiveState Perl Package
Manager (PPM) library. To install, download the
IPC-Run-<version>.tar.gz
source archive from
CPAN,
at https://metacpan.org/dist/IPC-Run, and
uncompress. Edit the buildenv.pl
file, and add a PERL5LIB
variable to point to the lib
subdirectory from the
extracted archive. For example:
$ENV{PERL5LIB}=$ENV{PERL5LIB} . ';c:\IPC-Run-0.94\lib';
The TAP tests run with vcregress
support the
environment variables PROVE_TESTS
, that is expanded
automatically using the name patterns given, and
PROVE_FLAGS
. These can be set on a Windows terminal,
before running vcregress
:
set PROVE_FLAGS=--timer --jobs 2 set PROVE_TESTS=t/020*.pl t/010*.pl
It is also possible to set up those parameters in
buildenv.pl
:
$ENV{PROVE_FLAGS}='--timer --jobs 2' $ENV{PROVE_TESTS}='t/020*.pl t/010*.pl'
Additionally, the behavior of TAP tests can be controlled by a set of environment variables, see Section 33.4.1.
Some of the TAP tests depend on a set of external commands that would
optionally trigger tests related to them. Each one of those variables
can be set or unset in buildenv.pl
:
GZIP_PROGRAM
Path to a gzip command. The default is
gzip
, which will search for a command by that
name in the configured PATH
.
LZ4
Path to a lz4 command. The default is
lz4
, which will search for a command by that
name in the configured PATH
.
OPENSSL
Path to a openssl command. The default is
openssl
, which will search for a command by that
name in the configured PATH
.
TAR
Path to a tar command. The default is
tar
, which will search for a command by that
name in the configured PATH
.
ZSTD
Path to a zstd command. The default is
zstd
, which will search for a command by that
name in the configured PATH
.