Install PostgreSQL Server or Client on MacOS for testing purpose

The default PostgreSQL installation for MacOS is via installer packaged by EDB, provides more features and easier for beginners. Personally I prefer to have PostgreSQL installed in specified folders, easier to manage multiple versions co-exists on my laptop and easier to uninstall and upgrade.

1. Download PostgreSQL binaries archive.

Link: https://www.enterprisedb.com/download-postgresql-binaries

2. Unzip them to a folder. Here it will unzip into /Users/donghua/Tools/pgsql

unzip postgresql-16.3-1-osx-binaries.zip -d /Users/donghua/Tools

3. Fix com.apple.quarantine issue on MacOS

sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine $i /Users/donghua/Tools/pgsql

for i in `find /Users/donghua/Tools/pgsql/bin -type f`
do
 	ls -l@ $i|grep com.apple.quarantine > /dev/null
	if [[ $? -eq 0 ]] then
		print "File quarantine: $i"
		sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine $i
	fi
done


for i in `find /Users/donghua/Tools/pgsql/lib -type f`
do
 	ls -l@ $i|grep com.apple.quarantine > /dev/null
	if [[ $? -eq 0 ]] then
		print "File quarantine: $i"
		sudo xattr -d com.apple.quarantine $i
	fi
done

4. Setup your environment variables.

Here I use zsh, put below entries to ~/.zprofile

export PGHOME=/Users/donghua/Tools/pgsql
export PGDATA=/Users/donghua/Tools/pgdata/16/dataexport PATH=$PATH:$PGHOME/binalias pgadmin4="open -a '/Users/donghua/Tools/pgsql/pgAdmin 4.app'"
alias pglog='cd $PGDATA/log/;ls -1t  | head -n 1  | xargs tail -f'