Create database from command line

Question

Change the user to postgres :

su - postgres

Create User for Postgres

$ createuser testuser

Create Database

$ createdb testdb

Acces the postgres Shell

psql ( enter the password for postgressql)

Provide the privileges to the postgres user

$ alter user testuser with encrypted password 'qwerty';
$ grant all privileges on database testdb to testuser;

Try:

sudo -u postgres psql -c 'create database test;'

createdb is a command line utility which you can run from bash and not from psql. To create a database from psql, use the create database statement like so:

create database [databasename];

Note: be sure to always end your SQL statements with ;

As some of the answers point out, createdb is a command line utility that could be used to create database.

Assuming you have a user named dbuser, the following command could be used to create a database and provide access to dbuser:

createdb -h localhost -p 5432 -U dbuser testdb

Replace localhost with your correct DB host name, 5432 with correct DB port, and testdb with the database name you want to create.

Now psql could be used to connect to this newly created database:

psql -h localhost -p 5432 -U dbuser -d testdb

Tested with createdb and psql versions 9.4.15.

As the default configuration of Postgres, a user called postgres is made and the user postgres has full super admin access to entire PostgreSQL instance running on your OS.

sudo -u postgres psql

The above command gets you the psql command line interface in admin mode.

Creating user

sudo -u postgres createuser <username>

Creating Database

 sudo -u postgres createdb <dbname>

NOTE: < > are not to be used while writing command, they are used just to signify the variables

PGPORT=5432
PGHOST="my.database.domain.com"
PGUSER="postgres"
PGDB="mydb"
createdb -h $PGHOST -p $PGPORT -U $PGUSER $PGDB