Building without Postgres installed?

[EliYk]

Hi,

Pardon my noobness, I'm trying to write a C++ postgres pipeline using taopq (the Python one is way too slow).

I saw that PostgreSQL itself is a dependency in CMakeLists.txt. However, it seems that libpq itself is much smaller - https://github.com/postgres/postgres/tree/master/src/backend/libpq

I built it by the instructions here, to receive a lipq.so.5.12

I also saw in the makefile a line that includes pg_config. Does this mean I still need postgres installed on the machine on which I'm using taopq? Is it somehow possible to avoid it, if I already have libpq.so?

Thanks, Eli

[d-frey]

I'm not an expert in this area either, but the intend was always to only require the client library, not the server. On my system, there are two packages I need to install to build taopq: The package for the library (libpq.so) and the -dev package so I get the headers and pg_config to build against that library. This is, of course, not the server.

Once you've build taopq and your executable using it, you could use that executable even when the -dev package is not installed, You'd only need the client library's package for that. Of course, using taopq will always require the -dev package as our headers include the libpq headers.

[h5rdly]

Can you elaborate about the dev package?

What files specifically are required?

(To get libpq.so, I went with the build suggested in this so question)

[d-frey]

I'm using Fedora 32, so I installed libpq and libpq-devel like this:

sudo dnf install libpq libpq-devel

and that's really all you need to do. Of course, I also installed the server as otherwise the client itself would be pretty useless. That is the postgresql-server package, but you shouldn't need it to compile taopq. That said, I haven't tested it, so maybe the CMakeLists.txt is not correct.

When a package is installed, you can list the installed files from a package with

rpm -ql libpq-devel

In this case, the headers like /usr/include/libpq-fe.h are the most important stuff to compile code against libpq.so.

[ColinH]

Also, building libpq yourself is very unusual, that's not something you would need to do under normal circumstances. To build a client application you'll need the libpq (libraries) and libpq-devel (headers) packages, to deploy a client application you'll only need the libpq package, and of course somewhere you'll need the actual server to connect your client to...

[ColinH]

@EliYk Did you manage to sort out the packages required for compiling?