Installation on Ubuntu

This is a guide for setting up postgresql on an Ubuntu system (which does not use systemd). It may vary a bit depending on your software versions, but hopefully it is close enough to get you started. To reduce duplication, I have removed most of the text before and after the instructions, since it applies to all linux distros, and have also removed notes about Windows or Mac installation, as the point of this wiki is to be Ubuntu-specific (though my guess would be it applies to most Debian-based systems). Thus, please start your installation by reading the beginning of the main installation wiki.

It is important that you install the database before the nfldb Python module. This is to prevent nfldb from accidentally creating an empty database and inserting all of the data via the nfldb-update script. While this will work, it will take considerably longer than importing a ready-made database.

A note about users

Many of the bash commands below need to be run as a specific user (i.e., root or postgres). To run a single command as root, start that line with sudo. To run a single command as postgres, precede it with sudo -u postgres.

For convenience, you can also run all commands as postgres by typing:

sudo su - postgres

You should note the bash prompt change as a result.

Setting up the nfldb database

If you don't already have PostgreSQL installed on your system, you will need to install it. There are specific Ubuntu installation instructions, but it should be as simple as running the following command as root.

apt-get install postgresql postgresql-contrib

Creating a database

Once PostgreSQL is installed, you will need to add a new database that you can import nfldb into. On Ubuntu, here are the rough steps that I followed:

As root:

mkdir /var/lib/postgresql/data
chown -c -R postgres:postgres /var/lib/postgresql

Start the postgresql server, login as postgres and set an encrypted password (the single quotes do need to surround your password):

service postgresql enable
service postgresql restart
psql -U postgres
# ALTER ROLE postgres WITH ENCRYPTED PASSWORD 'choose a superuser password';

If you get an error about the lock file when you try to restart (I did not, but my friend did), you might need to run this command as root:

chown -R postgres:postgres /var/run/postgresql/

Now edit /etc/postgresql/9.1/main/pg_hba.conf (as root or as postgres) replacing 9.1 with whatever you postgres version is and find the lines that read:

local    all    postgres    peer
local    all    all    peer

And change both peer to md5.

Then restart:

service postgresql restart

Create a new user for your nfldb database:

createuser -U postgres -E -P nfldb

Enter the new user's password twice and then enter the password for postgres (that you set above with the ALTER ROLE ... SQL command). The -E parameter specifies that the password should be encrypted. The user does not need to be a superuser, nor do they need to be able to create new roles. I said that they should be allowed to create new databases, but to be honest I'm not sure if that matters or not.

Create a database with the same name as the user (you will have to enter the password for the postgres user again):

createdb -U postgres -O nfldb nfldb

And enable the fuzzystrmatch extension so that you can do fuzzy player searching with player_search:

psql -U postgres -c 'CREATE EXTENSION fuzzystrmatch;' nfldb

Note that the above command requires superuser access, which is what the -U postgres is for (it logs in as the postgres user).

You should now be able to login as that user and connect to nfldb:

psql -U nfldb nfldb

Now you can head back to the main installation instructions and start with importing the database.