How to setup PostgreSQL and PGAdmin on Manjaro Linux / Arch

This guide is here just because I've messed up the installs on arch before, and turns out it's actually pretty easy to do.

Step 1 - Install the dependencies

sudo pacman -S yay
yay postgresql pgadmin4

This should automatically setup your postgres user and group.

Step 2 - Setup postgres service

sudo -u postgres -i # login as postgres
initdb --locale $LANG -E UTF8 -D '/var/lib/postgres/data/'
exit

sudo systemctl enable --now postgresql
sudo systemctl status postgresql # to check for any errors

Step 3 - Setup password

psql -U postgres

postgres=# \password # to set password

Step 4 - Setup connection security

$ su

# cd /var/lib/postgres/data
# cp pg_hba.conf pg_hba.conf.backup # in case you mess up
# nano pg_hba.conf

Your default pg_hba.conf might look like this:

 TYPE  DATABASE        USER            ADDRESS                 METHOD

# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local   all             all                                     trust
# IPv4 local connections:
host    all             all             127.0.0.1/32            trust
# IPv6 local connections:
host    all             all             ::1/128                 trust
# Allow replication connections from localhost, by a user with the
# replication privilege.
local   replication     all                                     trust
host    replication     all             127.0.0.1/32            trust
host    replication     all             ::1/128                 trust

"Method" is set to trust, meaning it won't ask for the password to anyone. To fix that, change the method from trust to md5 everywhere.

And that should be it for postgres!

Bonus: shortcuts

> psql dbname postgres # to directly open a database

postgres=# \c                       # see current database
postgres=# \l                       # see list of databases
postgres=# \c dbname                # set database
postgres=# create database dbname;  # create database
postgres=# \dt                      # see list of tables

Step 6 - PgAdmin

Open up pgadmin, click on "Add New Server", and add the following:

Host: localhost
Port: 5432
Maintenance database: postgres
Username: postgres
Password: <your password>

And PgAdmin should work just fine.

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