18.1. Building with Visual C++ or the Microsoft Windows SDK
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 2013 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 2013 and above. Compilation is supported down to Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 when building with Visual Studio 2013 to Visual Studio 2022 .
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";
18.1.1. Requirements
The following additional products are required to build
PostgreSQL
. Use the
config.pl
file to specify which directories the libraries
are available in.
- Microsoft Windows SDK
-
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
-
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 5.8.3 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.
- ActiveState TCL
-
Required for building PL/Tcl (Note: version 8.4 is required, the free Standard Distribution is sufficient).
- Bison and Flex
-
Bison and Flex are required to build from Git, but not required when building from a release file. Only Bison 1.875 or versions 2.2 and later will work. Flex must be version 2.5.31 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.exeandbison.exeto the PATH environment variable inbuildenv.plunless they are already in PATH. In the case of MinGW, the directory is the\msys\1.0\binsubdirectory of your MinGW installation directory.Note
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 intoC:\GnuWin32or use the NTFS short name path to GnuWin32 in your PATH environment setting (e.g.,C:\PROGRA~1\GnuWin32). - Diff
-
Diff is required to run the regression tests, and can be downloaded from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net .
- Gettext
-
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.
- MIT Kerberos
-
Required for GSSAPI authentication support. MIT Kerberos can be downloaded from https://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/dist/index.html .
- libxml2 and libxslt
-
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.
- LZ4
-
Required for supporting LZ4 compression. Binaries and source can be downloaded from https://github.com/lz4/lz4/releases .
- Zstandard
-
Required for supporting Zstandard compression. Binaries and source can be downloaded from https://github.com/facebook/zstd/releases .
- OpenSSL
-
Required for SSL support. Binaries can be downloaded from https://slproweb.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html or source from https://www.openssl.org .
- ossp-uuid
-
Required for UUID-OSSP support (contrib only). Source can be downloaded from http://www.ossp.org/pkg/lib/uuid/ .
- Python
-
Required for building PL/Python . Binaries can be downloaded from https://www.python.org .
- zlib
-
Required for compression support in pg_dump and pg_restore . Binaries can be downloaded from https://www.zlib.net .
18.1.2. Special Considerations for 64-Bit Windows
PostgreSQL will only build for the x64 architecture on 64-bit Windows, there is no support for Itanium processors.
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.
18.1.3. Building
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 psqlbuild 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.
18.1.4. Cleaning and Installing
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
18.1.5. Running the Regression Tests
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 checkvcregress installcheckvcregress plcheckvcregress contribcheckvcregress modulescheckvcregress ecpgcheckvcregress isolationcheckvcregress bincheckvcregress recoverycheckvcregress taptest
To change the schedule used (default is parallel), append it to the command line like:
vcregress check serial
vcregress taptest
can be used to run the TAP tests
of a target directory, like:
vcregress taptest src\bin\initdb\
For more information about the regression tests, see Chapter 33 .
Running the regression tests on client programs with
vcregress bincheck
, on recovery tests with
vcregress recoverycheck
, or TAP tests specified with
vcregress taptest
requires an additional Perl module
to be installed:
- IPC::Run
-
As of this writing,
IPC::Runis not included in the ActiveState Perl installation, nor in the ActiveState Perl Package Manager (PPM) library. To install, download theIPC-Run-source archive from CPAN, at https://metacpan.org/release/IPC-Run , and uncompress. Edit the.tar.gz buildenv.plfile, and add a PERL5LIB variable to point to thelibsubdirectory 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'
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 configuredPATH. -
LZ4 -
Path to a lz4 command. The default is
lz4, which will search for a command by that name in the configuredPATH. -
TAR -
Path to a tar command. The default is
tar, which will search for a command by that name in the configuredPATH. -
ZSTD -
Path to a zstd command. The default is
zstd, which will search for a command by that name in the configuredPATH.