how to set up the psql command in cygwin?

Question

I have a local dev site on my machine with Apache server and PostgreSQL 9.1 database. As I'm using Windows, I also installed Cygwin. I want to access to database and make some queries via Cygwin insead of pgAdmin III, but it tells me that psql command not found. How should I set up the psql command in cygwin?

Answer 1

As of today, you just have to install postgresql-client package in cygwin:

• Run your cygwin setup.exe file (this can be run multiple times to add more packages).
• Type postgresql into the search box, select postgresql-client and press "next" to install.

Now you can open Cygwin terminal and type psql to run!

Answer 2

The best combo for Cygwin on Windows, I've found, is the normal Windows Postgres installation combined with Cygwin psql.

Cygwin psql (and other command-line tools) can be compiled from source fairly easily. Here's the steps for 9.2.4:

$ wget http://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/source/v9.2.4/postgresql-9.2.4.tar.bz2
$ tar xjf postgresql-9.2.4.tar.bz2
$ cd postgresql-9.2.4/
$ ./configure
$ cd src/bin/psql
$ make

This creates a psql.exe binary that works well with Cygwin. However, by default, it tries to connect to the local instance using a Unix socket instead of TCP. So use -h to specify the hostname and force TCP, for example:

$ ./psql -h localhost -U postgres

Move this psql.exe to someplace on your path (e.g. ~/bin) and possibly wrap in a script to add '-h localhost' for convenience when no other arguments supplied.

The source could be modified to change the default, but that takes actual work ;)