Install on EC2

install postgresql

sudo yum install postgresql postgresql-server postgresql-devel sudo mkdir /usr/local/pgsql/ sudo mkdir /usr/local/pgsql/data sudo chown postgres /usr/local/pgsql/data sudo su postgres initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data postgres -D /usr/local/pgsql/data & exit

Install PostGIS. This requires some build tools, and also the GEOS and PROJ libraries. On a Micro instance, making the GEOS and PROJ libraries will take a while (about 5-10 minutes), and drive your server load average to the 1.00-2.00 range. I'm going to unnecessarily change directories to what should be the current working directory a few times, just to make sure we're in the same place. After GEOS, PROJ, and PostGIS are built, we will also need to update our libraries, so the server knows where to find them.

sudo yum install gcc make gcc-c++ libtool libxml2-devel

make a directory for building

cd /home/ec2-user/ mkdir postgis cd postgis

download, configure, make, install geos

wget http://download.osgeo.org/geos/geos-3.2.2.tar.bz2 tar xjf geos-3.2.2.tar.bz2 cd geos-3.2.2 ./configure make sudo make install

download, configure, make, install proj

cd /home/ec2-user/postgis/ wget http://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-4.7.0.tar.gz wget http://download.osgeo.org/proj/proj-datumgrid-1.5.zip tar xzf proj-4.7.0.tar.gz cd proj-4.7.0/nad unzip ../../proj-datumgrid-1.5.zip cd .. ./configure
make sudo make install

download, configure, make, install postgis

cd /home/ec2-user/postgis/ wget http://postgis.refractions.net/download/postgis-1.5.2.tar.gz tar xzf postgis-1.5.2.tar.gz cd postgis-1.5.2 ./configure --with-geosconfig=/usr/local/bin/geos-config make sudo make install

update your libraries

sudo su echo /usr/local/lib >> /etc/ld.so.conf exit sudo ldconfig

Now that PostGIS is installed, we should create a template database for PostGIS. Anytime you are generating a new database that requires geospatial data, you can create it from this template.

The default sql scripts for setting up postGIS have some errors in them in postgis-1.5.2. See http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/ticket/1820 and http://trac.osgeo.org/postgis/changeset/9735. The fix is to do a global replace in both sql files to replace 'C' with 'c' and 'SQL' with 'sql'.

setup our postgis template

createdb -U postgres template_postgis createlang -U postgres plpgsql template_postgis psql -U postgres -d template_postgis -f /usr/share/pgsql/contrib/postgis-1.5/postgis.sql psql -U postgres -d template_postgis -f /usr/share/pgsql/contrib/postgis-1.5/spatial_ref_sys.sql