Description
initdb creates a new
EnterpriseDB database cluster. A database
cluster is a collection of databases that are managed by a single
server instance.
Creating a database cluster consists of creating the directories in which
the database data will live, generating the shared catalog tables
(tables that belong to the whole cluster rather than to any particular
database), and creating the template1
database. When you later create a new database, everything in the
template1 database is copied.
It contains catalog tables filled in for things like the
built-in types.
initdb initializes the database cluster's
default locale and character set encoding. Some locale categories
are fixed for the lifetime of the cluster, so it is important to
make the right choice when running initdb.
Other locale categories can be changed later when the server is
started. initdb will write those locale
settings into the edb-postgres.conf
configuration file so they are the default, but they can be changed
by editing that file. To set the locale that
initdb uses, see the description of the
--locale option. The character set encoding can
be set separately for each database as it is created.
initdb determines the encoding for the
template1 database, which will serve as the
default for all other databases. To alter the default encoding use
the --encoding option.
initdb must be run as the user that will own the
server process, because the server needs to have access to the
files and directories that initdb creates.
Since the server may not be run as root, you must not run
initdb as root either. (It will in fact refuse
to do so.)
Although initdb will attempt to create the
specified data directory, often it won't have permission to do so,
since the parent of the desired data directory is often a root-owned
directory. To set up an arrangement like this, create an empty data
directory as root, then use chown to hand over
ownership of that directory to the database user account, then
su to become the database user, and
finally run initdb as the database user.