Not able to start PostgreSQL

Question

Have a CentOS7 Linux machine running (not managed by me; have limited rights to/in it).

Have a request to set PostgreSQL up in it.

Just installed PostgreSQL from the CentOS repository:

sudo yum install postgresql-server postgresql-contrib

All good with it.

Then did initialization of the database:

sudo yum install postgresql-server postgresql-contrib

All good with it.

But then the start:

sudo systemctl start postgresql

Fails:

Job for postgresql.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status postgresql.service" and "journalctl -xe" for details.

I do not have access to systemd-journal so nothing tod with "journalctl -xe", but then the:

systemctl status postgresql.service

returns:

● postgresql.service - PostgreSQL database server
   Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/postgresql.service; disabled; vendor preset: disabled)
   Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Fri 2020-04-24 16:41:04 EEST; 33s ago
  Process: 30690 ExecStart=/usr/bin/pg_ctl start -D ${PGDATA} -s -o -p ${PGPORT} -w -t 300 (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE)
  Process: 30684 ExecStartPre=/usr/bin/postgresql-check-db-dir ${PGDATA} (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)

postgres --version
postgres (PostgreSQL) 9.2.24

Any ideas what could be wrong here? Hot to continue with that?

Answer 1

There must be both PostgreSQL 9.2 and 9.3 installed on your machine. Deinstall them both and install version 12 from the PostgreSQL site. Remove the data directory and create a new one with the v12 installation. Then try again.

Answer 2

As the echo $PGDATA shows you have PG9.3 as well. Which means that 9.2 service will not start because the port 5432 might be already occupied by postgres 9.3 Do the following

ps- ef | grep postgres 

And get the postgres process id and kill all postgres processes.

Remove the 9.3 data directory using

rm -rf /var/lib/pgsql/9.3

Go to /usr/pgsql-9.2/bin and run the initdb using below command

./postgresql92-setup initdb

After that start the postgresql-9.2 service using

systemctl start postgresql-9.2.service