This post will be demonstrating how to easily install, configure and update a PostgreSQL instance on Windows, specifically via the Chocolatey package manager. Yes, you can always take the old school route by going to the official Postgres website, and download an installer, followed by clicking through a wizard a bunch of times. However, using a package manager makes it easier to install, and much easier to update regularly.

Installing Chocolatey

To install Chocolatey, you will first need to open a Powershell terminal, specifically in admin mode. Next, run Get-ExecutionPolicy. If it says “restricted”, then you will need to run either Set-ExecutionPolicy AllSigned or Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process.

Then, copy and paste the following into your terminal:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

This will install Chocolatey on your system. Once its done, run the command choco -v. If it outputs a version number (0.10.15, at the time of this writing), then we know that Chocolatey was installed sucessfully.

Installing Postgres

With that sorted out, we can now quickly install Postgres by running choco install postgresql. Enter y when prompted to. You will see that it sets a default (random hex value) password for the postgres user. IMPORTANT: Quickly copy and paste this default password from your terminal into a safe place, like a password manager, as you will need it to connect to the server. I highly recommend changing it to something more secure at your earliest convience with an ALTER USER query. The installation will also default to listening on port 5432. This is installation should also include the “stack builder” tool for adding extensions. Once that’s done, you should be more-or-less ready to go!

Additional Configurations

In addition to changing the default password, we should also add psql.exe to $PATH, so we can connect to and query databases on our server by running psql from Powershell, or the command prompt. psql.exe should be located in C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\12\bin. Once you successfully add psql to $PATH, then try running psql from a terminal. If it doesn’t throw any errors, then you succeeded. While there are certainly any number of other configs that you can do, that should be all that’s needed for now. Happy querying!

Final Thoughts

Going forward, it is going to be at lot easier to update my Postgres instance, along with other software that I have installed on my Windows machine. I don’t think I will be able to easily go back to the whole download an installer and click through wizard setup. That now just seems crude and primitive. Therefore, don’t always assume that installing and setting up a database server (or other software, for that matter) has to be super complicated.