Chapter 15. Installation on Windows

Although PostgreSQL is written for Unix-like operating systems and compiles under MinGW, the C client library (libpq) and the interactive terminal (psql) can be compiled using other Windows tool sets. Makefiles are included in the source distribution for Microsoft Visual C++ and Borland C++. It should be possible to compile the libraries manually for other configurations.

Tip

If you are using a Windows NT-based operating system or newer you can build and use all of PostgreSQLthe Unix way” if you install the MinGW toolkit first. In that case see Chapter 14, Installation Instructions.

To build everything that you can on Windows using Microsoft Visual C++, change into the src directory and type the command

nmake /f win32.mak

This assumes that you have Visual C++ in your path.

To build everything using using Borland C++, change into the src directory and type the command

make -DCFG=Release /f bcc32.mak

The following files will be built:

interfaces\libpq\Release\libpq.dll

The dynamically linkable frontend library

interfaces\libpq\Release\libpqdll.lib

Import library to link your programs to libpq.dll

interfaces\libpq\Release\libpq.lib

Static library version of the frontend library

bin\psql\Release\psql.exe

The PostgreSQL interactive terminal

The only file that really needs to be installed is the libpq.dll library. This file should in most cases be placed in the WINNT\SYSTEM32 directory (or in WINDOWS\SYSTEM on a Windows 95/98/ME system). If this file is installed using a setup program, it should be installed with version checking using the VERSIONINFO resource included in the file, to ensure that a newer version of the library is not overwritten.

If you plan to do development using libpq on this machine, you will have to add the src\include and src\interfaces\libpq subdirectories of the source tree to the include path in your compilers settings.

To use the library, you must add the libpqdll.lib file to your project. (In Visual C++, just right-click on the project and choose to add it.)

psql is compiled as a “console application”. As the Windows console windows use a different encoding than the rest of the system, you must take special care when using 8-bit characters at the psql prompt. When psql detects a problematic console code page, it will warn you at startup. To change the console code page, two things are neccessary: