Peering Manager requires a PostgreSQL database to store data. This can be hosted locally or on a remote server. Please note that Peering Manager does not support any other database backends as it uses some specific features of PostgreSQL.

Installation

If a recent enough version of PostgreSQL (>= 9.6) is not available through your distribution's package manager, you'll need to install it from an official PostgreSQL repository.

# apt-get update
# apt-get install -y postgresql libpq-dev

CentOS users also should modify the configuration to accept password-based authentication by replacing ident with md5 for all host entries in /var/lib/pgsql/9.6/data/pg_hba.conf.

Then, ensure that the service is started and enabled to run at boot:

# systemctl start postgresql-9.6
# systemctl enable postgresql-9.6

Database Creation

At a minimum, we need to create a database for Peering Manager and assign it a username and password for authentication.

# sudo -u postgres psql
psql (9.6.3)
Type "help" for help.

postgres=# CREATE DATABASE peering_manager ENCODING 'UTF8' LC_COLLATE = 'en_US.UTF-8' LC_CTYPE = 'en_US.UTF-8' TEMPLATE template0;
CREATE DATABASE
postgres=# CREATE USER peering_manager WITH PASSWORD 'DoNotUseMe';
CREATE ROLE
postgres=# GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE peering_manager TO peering_manager;
GRANT
postgres=# \q

You can test that authentication works with the following command. (Replace localhost with your database server if using a remote database.)

# psql -U peering_manager -W -h localhost peering_manager

If successful, you will enter a peering_manager prompt. Type \q to exit.

Migrating encoding to UTF-8

If your database was created with regular another encoding than UTF-8, you will need to migrate it. To convert the database you'll need to drop it and re-create it. It's not mandatory but you may face some issues if the encoding of your database is not set to UTF-8.

$ pg_dump --encoding utf8 peering_manager -f peering_manager.sql
postgres=# DROP DATABASE peering_manager;
DROP DATABASE
postgres=# CREATE DATABASE peering_manager ENCODING 'UTF8' LC_COLLATE = 'en_US.UTF-8' LC_CTYPE = 'en_US.UTF-8' TEMPLATE template0;
CREATE DATABASE
postgres=# GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON DATABASE peering_manager TO peering_manager;
GRANT
postgres=# \q
$ psql -f peering_manager.sql -d peering_manager