Build and install Postgres on macOS
Prerequisite: XCode Command Line Tools
Entering gcc -v in the terminal will begin a dialog to download the Xcode Command Line Tools if they’re not already installed.
Once the Command Line Tools are installed, the directions for compiling and installing PostgreSQL are the same on macOS as other Unix-compatible platforms.
Download the source code
Locate the appropriate version (v14.1 in this example) at https://www.postgresql.org/ftp/source/ and copy the link to the .bz2 archive.
In the terminal, change to a working directory (~/sandbox in this example), download the archive, and extract the archive:
% cd ~/sandbox
% curl -O https://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/source/v14.1/postgresql-14.1.tar.bz2
% tar -xf postgresql-14.1.tar.bz2
Build and Install
Move to the unarchived directory and read the README and INSTALL files:
% cd postgresql-14.1/
% less README INSTALL
Following the directions for Unix-compatible platforms, first run ./configure:
% ./configure
As long as there are no fatal errors, don’t worry about warnings or other information you don’t understand.
Next, run make to build the software from the source files:
% make
Run the last command as superuser to install postgres at the default location (/usr/local/pgsql):
% sudo make install
If you want to install the man pages and HTML docs, run this command as well:
% sudo make install-docs