First off, it's helpful to create a database named the same as your current use, to prevent the error when you just want to use the default database and create new tables without declaring the name of a db explicitly.
Replace "skynotify" with your username:
psql -d postgres -c "CREATE DATABASE skynotify ENCODING 'UTF-8';"
-d explicitly declares which database to use as the default for SQL statements that don't explicitly include a db name during this interactive session.
BASICS FOR GETTING A CLEAR PICTURE OF WHAT YOUR PostgresQL SERVER has in it.
You must connect to an existing database to use psql interactively. Fortunately, you can ask psql for a list of databases:
psql -l
.
List of databases
Name | Owner | Encoding | Collate | Ctype | Access privileges
----------------------------------+-----------+----------+-------------+-------------+-------------------
skynotify | skynotify | UTF8 | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |
myapp_dev | skynotify | UTF8 | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |
postgres | skynotify | UTF8 | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |
ruby-getting-started_development | skynotify | UTF8 | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |
template0 | skynotify | UTF8 | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 | =c/skynotify +
| | | | | skynotify=CTc/skynotify
template1 | skynotify | UTF8 | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 | =c/skynotify +
| | | | | skynotify=CTc/skynotify
(6 rows)
This does NOT start the interactive console, it just outputs a text based table to the terminal.
As another answers says, postgres is always created, so you should use it as your failsafe database when you just want to get the console started to work on other databases. If it isn't there, then list the databases and then use any one of them.
In a similar fashion, select tables from a database:
psql -d postgres -c "\dt;"
My "postgres" database has no tables, but any database that does will output a text based table to the terminal (standard out).
And for completeness, we can select all rows from a table too:
psql -d ruby-getting-started_development -c "SELECT * FROM widgets;"
.
id | name | description | stock | created_at | updated_at
----+------+-------------+-------+------------+------------
(0 rows)
Even if there are zero rows returned, you'll get the field names.
If your tables have more than a dozen rows, or you're not sure, it'll be more useful to start with a count of rows to understand how much data is in your database:
psql -d ruby-getting-started_development -c "SELECT count(*) FROM widgets;"
.
count
-------
0
(1 row)
And don't that that "1 row" confuse you, it just represents how many rows are returned by the query, but the 1 row contains the count you want, which is 0 in this example.
NOTE: a db created without an owner defined will be owned by the current user.
psql -d postgres -U postgres -h localhostshow? Without flags it defaults to the CLI user, and I would have said it defaults to the "postgres" admin db but I don't have a mac to test on. – Ruggercreatedb <user>worked for me. – Bryanpsql -U user -d postgres, this ensures that , user is connected to postgres database, which is already present. So we need to pass database also while login. – Mackenzie