Re: Need some help setting up pgAgent

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 2:21 AM, Mike Christensen <mike(at)kitchenpc(dot)com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 2:07 AM, Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> wrote:
>> On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 2:32 PM, Mike Christensen <mike(at)kitchenpc(dot)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
>

Sorry, it looks like it defaulted to the wrong DB. I created the
schema in the "postgres" database and now I see a Jobs node..

One last question - How do I configure pgAgent to start automatically?

Mike