un petit error...

[solarbird]

hm hm hm I think I made a mistake setting up mastodon

so i usually set up my servers to have a separate /home partition and naturally did that here too, with a / of 30gb, which is normally totally fine, i run lean installs.

the problem of course is that postgresql is storing the local database in /var/lib, oops. so we're fine for now but not forever.

is there any reason not to create /home/postgres, clone /var/lib/postgres contents over, and softlink /var/lib/postgres to /home/postgres?

or is it better to clone then edit postgresql.conf to point to /home/postgres?

eta: another mastodon instance administration told me to clone then edit postgresql.conf because system call reasons. and it worked! very cleanly too. genuine "phew" moment lol

Comments

[sistawendy]

As long as Postgres is OK with the symlink, I don't see why not. A quick google suggests that it's fine. You could try it with a test instance first.

[solarbird]

I got told! By a mastodon admin. Clone it and edit the .conf, don't use a symlink, there can be surprises.

[wrog]

I believe you want to learn about TABLESPACEs
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/15/manage-ag-tablespaces.html
Basic idea is that if there are particular tables that get large you can put them on a different partition that's big enough for them. I believe you can also change the default tablespace for a database.

Under the hood, they're symlinks but they're symlinks that Postgres knows about.

[solarbird]

Oh, well that's neat.

In my case turned out that 1) db doesn't actually get that big so I was probably safe anyway lol and 2) cloning and editing the .conf is the correct answer in my specific case. But yeah TABLESPACE is neat and I should remember it. Thanks!