PL/Parrot

PL/Parrot is a PostgreSQL procedural language for the Parrot Virtual Machine.

Installation

For the impatient, to install PL/Parrot into a PostgreSQL database, just do this:

make
make install
make installcheck

If you get an error such as:

Makefile:13: /usr/lib/postgresql/8.4/lib/pgxs/src/makefiles/pgxs.mk: No such file or directory make: *** No rule to make target `/usr/lib/postgresql/8.4/lib/pgxs/src/makefiles/pgxs.mk'. Stop.

then you probably installed postgres from a debian package. You need to install the postgresql-server-dev-X package, where X is your version of PostgreSQL. For example:

sudo apt-get install postgresql-server-dev-8.4

To run the tests with pg_prove you should create the plpgsql language in your database. The default database name is your current username, so this should work:

createlang plpgsql $USER
make test

If you encounter an error such as:

"Makefile", line 8: Need an operator

You need to use GNU make, which may well be installed on your system as 'gmake':

gmake
gmake install
gmake installcheck

If you encounter an error such as:

make: pg_config: Command not found

Be sure that you have pg_config installed and in your path. If you used a package management system such as RPM to install PostgreSQL, be sure that the -devel package is also installed. If necessary, add the path to pg_config to your $PATH environment variable:

env PATH=$PATH:/path/to/pgsql/bin \
make && make install && make installcheck

And finally, if all that fails, copy the entire distribution directory to the contrib/ subdirectory of the PostgreSQL source tree and try it there without the $USE_PGXS variable:

make NO_PGXS=1
make install NO_PGXS=1
make installcheck NO_PGXS=1

If you encounter an error such as:

ERROR:  must be owner of database regression

You need to run the test suite using a super user, such as the default "postgres" super user:

make installcheck PGUSER=postgres

Testing PL/Parrot with PL/Parrot

In addition to the PostgreSQL-standard installcheck target, the test target uses the pg_prove Perl program to do its testing, which requires TAP::Harness, included in Test::Harness 3.x. You'll need to make sure that you use a database with PL/pgSQL loaded, or else the tests won't work. pg_prove supports a number of environment variables that you might need to use, including all the usual PostgreSQL client environment variables:

• $PGDATABASE
• $PGHOST
• $PGPORT
• $PGUSER

You can use it to run the test suite as a database super user like so:

make test PGUSER=postgres

Of course, if you're running the tests from the contrib/ directory, you should add the NO_PGXS variable.

Adding PL/Parrot to a Database

Once PL/Parrot has been built and tested, you can install it into a PL/pgSQL-enabled database:

psql -d dbname -f plparrot.sql

If you want PL/Parrot to be available to all new databases, install it into the "template1" database:

psql -d template1 -f plparrot.sql

The plparrot.sql script will also be installed in the contribdirectory under the directory output bypg_config --sharedir`. So you can always do this:

psql -d template1 -f `pg_config --sharedir`/contrib/plparrot.sql

License

This code is distributed under the terms of the Artistic License 2.0. For more details, see the full text of the license in the file LICENSE.