How to run PostgreSQL as daemontools service?

Question

1. svscanboot was ran and added to autostart
2. added script from article http://thedjbway.b0llix.net/services/postgresql.html to /service/postgres/run and change mode a+x,root owner
3. Add service: svc -u /service/postgres
4. Check svstat /service/postgres, script not ran

Answer 1

Following that tutorial all of the way through, you should have a log service, too. The log service will have information in its log file(s) about why the main service failed. You can read the log file(s) with tail, grep, and less.

Vanilla daemontools' svstat only tells you whether a service is currently up or down. You have no basis for asserting that the script did not run. Indeed, it very probably did run; and the error messages in the log service's log file(s) will tell you what error messages it output when it did.

You can, of course, make the script explain more of its operations in a perfectly ordinary way. It is a #!/bin/sh interpreted script after all, and the shell's -v and -x options can thus be used just as in any other shell script.

The likeliest candidate for what you'll find in your logs is that postmaster isn't on your PATH and is in a subdirectory of somewhere like /usr/lib/postgresql/ or /usr/local/pgsql. In this case either you have to invoke it as /usr/lib/postgresql/bin/postmaster or you have to prepend /usr/lib/postgresql/bin/ to your path within the script so that it finds the program when it is invoked as plain old unadorned postmaster. This latter is explained in the PostgreSQL documentation, q.v..

Further reading

• "Environment variables". PostgreSQL Current Documentation. 2016. The PostgreSQL Global Development Group.
• "Server start-up failures". PostgreSQL Current Documentation. 2016. The PostgreSQL Global Development Group.