An Almost Idiot's Guide to Installing PostGIS 1.5 on PostgreSQL 9.0 via Yum   

Installing PostGIS package

Verify the postgis package is available with a:

yum list | grep postgis

You should see a list that looks like:

postgis90.i386                           1.5.2-1.rhel5                 pgdg90
postgis90-debuginfo.i386                 1.5.2-1.rhel5                 pgdg90
postgis90-docs.i386                      1.5.2-1.rhel5                 pgdg90
postgis90-utils.i386                     1.5.2-1.rhel5                 pgdg90

Now we do a:

Which should present a screen that looks like:

================================================================================
 Package            Arch          Version                 Repository       Size
================================================================================
Installing:
 postgis90          i386          1.5.2-1.rhel5           pgdg90          1.6 M
Installing for dependencies:
 geos               i386          3.2.2-1.rhel5           pgdg90          582 k
 proj               i386          4.7.0-1.rhel5           pgdg90          162 k

Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Install       3 Package(s)
Upgrade       0 Package(s)

Total download size: 2.3 M
Is this ok [y/N]

Type y

If all goes well, you should get a screen that looks like this:

Downloading Packages:
(1/3): proj-4.7.0-1.rhel5.i386.rpm                       | 162 kB     00:01
(2/3): geos-3.2.2-1.rhel5.i386.rpm                       | 582 kB     00:02
(3/3): postgis90-1.5.2-1.rhel5.i386.rpm                  | 1.6 MB     00:04
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total                                           253 kB/s | 2.3 MB     00:09
Running rpm_check_debug
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
  Installing     : geos                                                     1/3
  Installing     : proj                                                     2/3
  Installing     : postgis90                                                3/3

Installed:
  postgis90.i386 0:1.5.2-1.rhel5

Dependency Installed:
  geos.i386 0:3.2.2-1.rhel5              proj.i386 0:4.7.0-1.rhel5

Complete!

Crerating a spatial database

Okay now that we have that installed. All the PostGIS binaries and contribs are located by default in: /usr/pgsql-9.0

su postgres
cd /usr/pgsql-9.0/share/contrib/postgis-1.5
ls

Should show you a screen that looks like:

postgis.sql                   postgis_upgrade_15_minor.sql
postgis_upgrade_13_to_15.sql  spatial_ref_sys.sql
postgis_upgrade_14_to_15.sql  uninstall_postgis.sql

The postgis_comments.sql file file that installs database psql/pgAdmin online help online help is not listed. The postgis installed docs are located in /usr/share/doc/postgis90-1.5.2, but I couldn't find the postgis_comments.sql file.

If you want that, it's located in the docs folder of the official PostGIS 1.5.2 source tar ball and you install it after you have installed postgis.sql.

To create a spatial database or spatially enable a non-spatial database we do this: Note for the GRANT - if you are not paranoid about security, you could set that to ALL. For geography_columns there isn't any reason to give update rights since its a view into the system tables.

psql -U postgres -p 5432 

At the psql prompt do

create database template_postgis15;
\c template_postgis15
\i postgis.sql
\i spatial_ref_sys.sql
GRANT SELECT ON geometry_columns TO PUBLIC;
GRANT SELECT ON spatial_ref_sys TO PUBLIC;
GRANT SELECT ON geography_columns TO PUBLIC;
\c postgres
UPDATE pg_database SET datistemplate='true' WHERE datname='template_postgis15';
CREATE ROLE mygisuser LOGIN PASSWORD 'whatever' CREATEDB;
CREATE DATABASE mygisdb WITH ENCODING='UTF8' OWNER=mygisuser TEMPLATE=template_postgis15;
\q #logs you out.

Now we connect as our user:

                                          postgis_full_version
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 POSTGIS="1.5.2" GEOS="3.2.2-CAPI-1.6.2" PROJ="Rel. 4.7.1, 23 September 2009" LIBXML="2.6.26" USE_STATS

 SELECT ST_AsText( ST_Centroid('LINESTRING(1 2, 3 4)'::geometry));
 st_astext
------------
 POINT(2 3)

What about PostGIS 2.0?

Thought you would never ask. Well we've been playing with it on Windows, but have yet to compile and install on Linux. We will be doing that in the next week or so and write up a how to on that. I will say that the new features in PostGIS 2.0 are to put it lightly, mind blowing. We've got true 3D surfaces, topology, lots more processing functions, raster with mapalgebra and even export to JPEG etc which looks like it will make it into PostGIS 2.0. We have tiger geocoder with both geocoder and reverse gecoder functions to work with Tiger 2010 census. We have to cleanup the tiger loader for Linux a bit more and will do that before PostGIS 2.0 release. We've got X3D output and GML for surfaces to target CityGML needs. We have the whole world in our hands. I would say we've got a good 2 more months before we will be ready to release.