Creating A New Postgres Template Database Using Bash Script

• One thing that is sometimes useful when you have multiple developers accessing the same Postgres database server is to setup your own template so that you can avoid contention. That way when someone is in the template goofing around your automated unit tests that create a new database don’t break.
• I have come up with a bash script that does (more or less) what the author wanted. I had to make a daily business database copy on a production system, this script seems to do the trick. Remember to change the database name/user/pw values.

#!/bin/bash
if [ 1 -ne $# ]
then
  echo "Usage `basename $0` {tar.gz database file}"
  exit 65;
fi

if [ -f "$1" ]
then
  EXTRACTED=`tar -xzvf $1`
  echo "using database archive: $EXTRACTED";
else
  echo "file $1 does not exist"
  exit 1
fi

PGUSER=dbuser
PGPASSWORD=dbpw
export PGUSER PGPASSWORD
datestr=`date +%Y%m%d`

dbname="dbcpy_$datestr"
createdbcmd="CREATE DATABASE $dbname WITH OWNER = postgres ENCODING = 'UTF8' TABLESPACE = pg_default LC_COLLATE = 'en_US.UTF-8' LC_CTYPE = 'en_US.UTF-8' CONNECTION LIMIT = -1;"
dropdbcmp="DROP DATABASE $dbname"

echo "creating database $dbname"
psql -c "$createdbcmd"

rc=$?
if [[ $rc != 0 ]] ; then
  rm -rf "$EXTRACTED"
  echo "error occured while creating database $dbname ($rc)"
  exit $rc
fi

echo "loading data into database"
psql $dbname < $EXTRACTED > /dev/null

rc=$?

rm -rf "$EXTRACTED"

if [[ $rc != 0 ]] ; then
  psql -c "$dropdbcmd"
  echo "error occured while loading data to database $dbname ($rc)"
  exit $rc
fi

echo "finished OK"

If the database has open connections, this script may help. I use this to create a test database from a backup of the live-production database every night. This assumes that you have an .SQL backup file from the production db (I do this within webmin).

#!/bin/sh

dbname="desired_db_name_of_test_enviroment"
username="user_name"
fname="/path to /ExistingBackupFileOfLive.sql"

dropdbcmp="DROP DATABASE $dbname"
createdbcmd="CREATE DATABASE $dbname WITH OWNER = $username "

export PGPASSWORD=MyPassword

echo "**********"
echo "** Dropping $dbname"
psql -d postgres -h localhost -U "$username" -c "$dropdbcmp"

echo "**********"
echo "** Creating database $dbname"
psql -d postgres -h localhost -U "$username" -c "$createdbcmd"

echo "**********"
echo "** Loading data into database"
psql -d postgres -h localhost -U "$username" -d "$dbname" -a -f "$fname"