Chapter 2. Building and Installing pgtcl-ng

To build pgtcl-ng on Unix-like Systems, you need:

Pgtcl-ng is Tcl Extension Architecture (TEA) compliant, shipping with a standard configure script. You do not need to have a PostgreSQL source distribution available to build pgtcl-ng, but you need a PostgreSQL installation with libraries and header files.

After unpacking the pgtcl-ng distribution, change directory into the top level of the distribution.

To configure pgtcl-ng, the paths to the to the PostgreSQL include files and library files must be known. Starting with pgtcl-ng release 1.6.0, if the PostgreSQL command pg_config can be located with your command search PATH, you do not need specify the locations. For example, just this will work on many systems:

./configure

If pg_config is not on your PATH (or you are building a pgtcl-ng older than 1.6.0), you need to specify the location of the PostgreSQL library and include directories. For example:

./configure --with-postgres-include=/opt/postgresql/include \
            --with-postgres-lib=/opt/postgresql/lib

The location of the Tcl installation also is needed. On many systems, this is automatically located by configure. If not, use --with-tcl=DIR, where DIR is the path of the directory containing tclConfig.sh, and --with-tclinclude=IDIR, where IDIR is the path of the directory containing Tcl header files. You might be able to omit --with-tclinclude if you have only one Tcl installation and the header files are in a common place. (For some reason, configure does not use the information in tclConfig.sh to locate the header files.) For example, the following works on Ubuntu-14.04LTS (assuming the tcl8.5 and tcl8.5-dev packages are installed, as well as the PostgreSQL client packages):

./configure --with-tcl=/usr/lib/tcl8.5

This may be needed if you have Tcl installed in an unusual place, or have multiple versions of Tcl installed:

./configure --with-tcl=/opt/tcl86/lib --with-tclinclude=/opt/tcl86/include

You can also use --libdir=DIR to specify the installation target directory if you want to use make install. You can omit --libdir if you are going to manually install the library.

To build pgtcl-ng, just type:

$  make 

If all goes well, you will end up with a shared library file named something like libpgtcl2.1.1.so.

You can install pgtcl-ng with:

$  make install

to install everything in the paths set during configure, as indicated above. If the paths are chosen right, the result will be enabled for package loading, as described in Section 3.1, “Using the Tcl Package Command”.

You may choose instead to manually install pgtcl-ng. Refer to Chapter 3, Loading pgtcl into an Application for methods of using pgtcl-ng with your application. If you will be loading libpgtcl directly in your application, you need only copy that file into a convenient location for loading. Note that libpgtcl will need to find the PostgreSQL libpq loadable library.

If you want to be able to load libpgtcl into applications using

package require Pgtcl

you need to install libpgtcl into a subdirectory of Tcl's tcl_pkgPath or auto_path, and include the file pkgIndex.tcl which tells Tcl how to load the package. For example:

$ mkdir /usr/lib/tcl8.6/pgtcl2.1
$ cp libpgtcl2.1.1.so pkgIndex.tcl /usr/lib/tcl8.6/pgtcl2.1

This is what the make install target does. Note: The name of the directory under the Tcl library directory is not important, as the extension will be found regardless of the directory name. You may choose to use the three-part version number in the name, or just the major and minor version numbers.