Although PostgreSQL is written for
Unix-like operating systems, the C client library
(libpq) and the interactive terminal
(psql) can be compiled natively under
Windows. The makefiles included in the source distribution are
written for Microsoft Visual C++ and will
probably not work with other systems. It should be possible to
compile the libraries manually in other cases.
Tip: If you are using Windows 98 or newer you can build and use all of
PostgreSQL "the Unix way"
if you install the Cygwin toolkit first.
In that case see Chapter 1.
To build everything that you can on
Windows, change into the
src directory and type the command
nmake /f win32.mak
This assumes that you have Visual C++ in
your path.
The following files will be built:
- interfaces\libpq\Release\libpq.dll
The dynamically linkable frontend library
- interfaces\libpq\Release\libpqdll.lib
Import library to link your program to libpq.dll
- interfaces\libpq\Release\libpq.lib
Static library version of the frontend library
- bin\psql\Release\psql.exe
The PostgreSQL interactive terminal
The only file that really needs to be installed is the
libpq.dll library. This file should in most
cases be placed in the WINNT\SYSTEM32 directory
(or in WINDOWS\SYSTEM on a Windows 95/98/ME
system). If this file is installed using a setup program, it should
be installed with version checking using the
VERSIONINFO resource included in the file, to
ensure that a newer version of the library is not overwritten.
If you plan to do development using libpq on this machine, you will
have to add the src\include and
src\interfaces\libpq subdirectories of the
source tree to the include path in your compilers settings.
To use the libraries, you must add the
libpqdll.lib file to your project. (In Visual
C++, just right-click on the project and choose to add it.)
