Waiting for 9.3 – pg_isready

On 23rd of January, Robert Haas committed patch:

pg_isready
 
New command-line utility to test whether a server is ready to
accept connections.
 
Phil Sorber, reviewed by Michael Paquier and Peter Eisentraut

Disclaimer: Phil is my colleague in OmniTI

In October 2012, Phil posted mail to pgsql-hackers mailing list where he attached first version of pg_ping tool.

This tool was supposed to make checking if PostgreSQL server is up – easier.

3 months, quite a lot of mails, and at least one name change later – we got it.

Usually, when one wants to check if PostgreSQL is running, she/he just connects and tries things like ‘SELECT 1'. But libpq, which (for those of you that don't know) is the library that implements communication between client and server, has a specialized function PQping(), which does it nicer – without running actual query. Just connection.

So, how to use it (pg_isready program)? –help is pretty standard:

=$ pg_isready --help
pg_isready issues a connection check to a PostgreSQL database.
 
Usage:
  pg_isready [OPTION]...
 
Options:
  -d, --dbname=DBNAME      database name
  -q, --quiet              run quietly
  -V, --version            output version information, then exit
  -?, --help               show this help, then exit
 
Connection options:
  -h, --host=HOSTNAME      database server host or socket directory
  -p, --port=PORT          database server port
  -t, --timeout=SECS       seconds to wait when attempting connection, 0 disables (default: 3)
  -U, --username=USERNAME  database username
 
Report bugs to <pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org>.

Usage is pretty siple:

=$ pg_isready ; echo "return code = $?"
/tmp:5920 - accepting connections
return code = 0

In case when I'll try to connect to database that is down:

=$ pg_isready -p 5432 ; echo "return code = $?"
/tmp:5432 - no response
return code = 2

All in all – pretty simple thing, but it is nice addition that will simplify monitoring.

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