Running pgbackrest on FreeBSD
pgbackrest is an amazing tool for backup and recovery of a PostgreSQL database. However, and this is not a critique at all, it has some Linux-isms that make it difficult to run on FreeBSD.
I tried to install and run it on FreeBSD 12, stopping immediatly at the compilation part. So
I opened an issue to get some help, and then tried to experiment a little more to see if at least I could compile.
The first trial was to cross-compile: I created the executable (
pgbackrest has a single executable) on a Linux machine, then moved it to the FreeBSD machine along with all the
ldd libraries (placed into
/compat/linux/lib64). But
libpthread.so.0 prevented me to start the command:
% ./pgbackrest
./pgbackrest: error while loading shared libraries: libpthread.so.0:
cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
So I switched back to native compilation and, as described in the
issue I made a little changes to the
client.c and the
Makefile. Since it compiled (using of course
gmake), I also made a little more changes to
Makefile to compile and install it the FreeBSD way (i.e., under
/usr/local/bin). The full diff is the following (some changes are not shown in the issue):
% git diff
diff --git a/src/Makefile b/src/Makefile
index 73672bff..0472c7f1 100644
--- a/src/Makefile
+++ b/src/Makefile
@@ -8,7 +8,7 @@
CC=gcc
# Compile using C99 and Posix 2001 standards (also _DARWIN_C_SOURCE for MacOS)
-CSTD = -std=c99 -D_POSIX_C_SOURCE=200112L -D_DARWIN_C_SOURCE
+CSTD = -std=c99
# Compile optimizations
COPT = -O2
@@ -51,7 +51,7 @@ LDFLAGS = -lcrypto -lssl -lxml2 -lz $(LDPERL) $(LDEXTRA)
# Install options
####################################################################################################################################
# Modify destination install directory
-DESTDIR =
+DESTDIR = /usr/local/
####################################################################################################################################
# List of required source files. main.c should always be listed last and the rest in alpha order.
@@ -175,8 +175,8 @@ pgbackrest: $(OBJS)
# Installation. DESTDIR can be used to modify the install location.
####################################################################################################################################
install: pgbackrest
- install -d $(DESTDIR)/usr/bin
- install -m 755 pgbackrest $(DESTDIR)/usr/bin
+ install -d $(DESTDIR)bin
+ install -m 755 pgbackrest $(DESTDIR)/bin
####################################################################################################################################
# Compile rules
diff --git a/src/common/io/tls/client.c b/src/common/io/tls/client.c
index ddddb790..10b1d538 100644
--- a/src/common/io/tls/client.c
+++ b/src/common/io/tls/client.c
@@ -25,6 +25,7 @@ TLS Client
#include "common/type/keyValue.h"
#include "common/wait.h"
#include "crypto/crypto.h"
+#include <netinet/in.h>
/***********************************************************************************************************************************
Object type
Then, following the FreeBSD software paths, I created
/usr/local/etc/pgbackrest/pgbackrest.conf and prooceed.
So far everything seems working, even if as far as I know,
FreeBSD is not a tested platform, so I’m working at my own risk (and so are you if you doing the same installation)!
One little annoying detail is the configuration file:
pgbackrest defaults to
/etc/pgbackrest/pgbackrest.conf, and such file seems to me to be hardcoded into the
config/parse.c source file:
#define PGBACKREST_CONFIG_FILE PROJECT_BIN ".conf"
#define PGBACKREST_CONFIG_ORIG_PATH_FILE "/etc/" PGBACKREST_CONFIG_FILE
STRING_STATIC(PGBACKREST_CONFIG_ORIG_PATH_FILE_STR, PGBACKREST_CONFIG_ORIG_PATH_FILE);
or at least I don’t see any comfortable way to change such behavior. The problem is that having to specify the FreeBSD-style configuration file
/usr/local/etc/pgbackrest/pgbackrest.conf is not only annoying, but can cause weird errors, most notably an apparently unrelated error like
option pg1-path must be specified when relative wal paths are used
because the
archive_command specified did not included the same configuration file and
pgbackrest was looking for its default. In other words, ensures that the PostgreSQL instance has something like:
archive_command = '/usr/local/bin/pgbackrest
--stanza=main
--config=/usr/local/etc/pgbackrest/pgbackrest.conf
archive-push %p'
That’s made me think that linking
/usr/local/etc/pgbackrest directory to
/etc/pgbackrest could be, at this point a good solution to avoid some future mess.