Re: Need some help setting up pgAgent - Mailing list pgsql-general

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 2:07 AM, Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org> wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 2:32 PM, Mike Christensen <mike@kitchenpc.com> wrote:
>> Okay my required n00b question of the week, hopefully this'll be an easy one..
>>
>> I decided to give pgAgent a shot, because there's this stored sproc
>> (sorry, function) I need to run nightly and I think spending hours
>> figuring out pgAgent would somehow be better than the 3 minutes it
>> would take to add a cron job that calls psql..
>>
>> I'm following the directions at:
>> http://www.pgadmin.org/docs/1.6/pgagent-install.html
>
> Why such an old version? Try
> http://www.pgadmin.org/docs/1.12/pgagent-install.html
>
>> However, the heading "Daemon installation on *nix" needs me to believe
>> that running pgagent from the command line should install the daemon,
>> and then things should be happily running in the background.  However,
>> when I run the command line as instructed, it just sits there and does
>> nothing.  I never get returned to the bash prompt, it's as if the
>> daemon is just running in interactive mode until I stop the process..
>
> Did you use the -f option?
>
>> Maybe I'm missing something, or I have to add that command line to
>> some config file.  I'm not a unix guru but from my past experiences, I
>> can usually run daemons with "/etc/init.d/blah start" - pgAgent
>> doesn't seem to be installed in that manner.
>
> If you built from source, it's up to you to create the startup script.
> The pgAgent source tree doesn't contain OS-specific startup scripts.
>
>> Second, assuming the daemon is running in interactive mode, like..
>> now what?  The docs have no next steps.  How do I create a new job to
>> run my SQL function every night?  From some documentation from
>> Postgres Plus, I was led to believe that there should be a "Jobs" tree
>> in pgAdmin created..  But I see nothing.  Thanks!
>
> Did you setup the database per the part of the docs prior to that section?
>
> The "next steps" are most certainly there - see the index page at
> http://www.pgadmin.org/docs/1.12/pgagent.html
>
> --
> Dave Page
> Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
> Twitter: @pgsnake
>
> EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com
> The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
>

Thanks for the info!  First, I have no idea what version of pgAgent it
is.  Where does it say?  I installed it using apt-get..

apt-cache search pgagent
pgagent - job scheduler for PostgreSQL

It doesn't say the version, but that's the only match..  Maybe there's
a bin file or something better?

I ran it using:

/usr/bin/pgagent hostaddr=127.0.0.1 dbname=KitchenPC user=root

and it immediately returned to the bash prompt, and it appears to be running:

ps | grep pgagent
 4134 pts/0    00:00:00 pgagent

I ran the .sql file that it came with, and it created a new catalog
called pgAgent.

However, I'm still not sure what to do next.  According to the
instructions, pgAdmin should show a node called "Jobs".  I don't see
that.  I'm using pgAdmin for OS/X and connecting to the server from
remote over SSL.  Thanks!

Mike