Quickstart to using pg-el

These illustrative examples assume you have a PostgreSQL user pgeltestuser with password pgeltest who owns a database pgeltestdb. To set that up with a local PostgreSQL database, use commands similar to the following:

Note

Create a test user and database with a local PostgreSQL

sudo -u postgres createuser --createdb pgeltestuser
sudo -u postgres createdb --owner=pgeltestuser pgeltestdb
sudo -u postgres psql
postgres=# alter user pgeltestuser with encrypted password 'pgeltest';

If you want to enable and test the support for the HSTORE and pgvector extensions, you will need to load them into the test database as PostgreSQL superuser (the normal user pgeltestuser we created above is not allowed to load extensions). The pgvector extension generally needs to be installed separately from PostgreSQL (for example by installing the postgresql-17-pgvector package on Debian).

sudo -u postgres psql
postgres=# CREATE EXTENSION hstore;
CREATE EXTENSION
postgres=# CREATE EXTENSION vector;
CREATE EXTENSION

The same applies to the PostGIS extension.

Now, from your preferred Emacs Lisp shell (here M-x ielm), check that you are able to connect to and authenticate with the database from Emacs:

Note

Connect to PostgreSQL from Emacs

ELISP> (require 'pg)
pg
ELISP> (defvar *pg* (pg-connect-plist "pgeltestdb" "pgeltestuser" :password "pgeltest" :host "localhost"))
*pg*

If you don’t already have PostgreSQL installed locally, it may be convenient for you to use PostgreSQL Docker Community images, using Docker or Podman. I recommend installing Podman because it’s fully free software, whereas Docker is partly commercial. Podman is also able to run containers “rootless”, without special privileges, which is good for security, and doesn’t require a background daemon. Podman has a docker-compatible commandline interface.

Note

Start up PostgreSQL inside a Podman container

podman run -d --name pgsql \
   -v /dev/log:/dev/log \
   -v /var/run/postgresql:/var/run/postgresql \
   --publish 127.0.0.1:5432:5432 \
   -e POSTGRES_DB=pgeltestdb \
   -e POSTGRES_USER=pgeltestuser \
   -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=pgeltest \
   docker.io/library/postgres:latest

then connect from Emacs with

ELISP> (pg-connect-plist "pgeltestdb" "pgeltestuser" :password "pgeltest" :host "localhost")

or connect over a local Unix socket

ELISP> (pg-connect-local "/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432" "pgeltestdb" "pgeltestuser "pgeltest")

Now some simple interactions with the database:

ELISP> (pg-backend-version *pg*)
"PostgreSQL 18.1 (Debian 18.1-1) on x86_64-pc-linux-gnu, compiled by gcc (Debian 15.2.0-8) 15.2.0, 64-bit"
ELISP> (let ((res (pg-exec *pg* "SELECT 42, 1.23")))
           (pg-result res :tuple 0))
(42 1.23)

Note that the first query has returned an Emacs Lisp string, and the second query has returned a tuple (represented as a list) where the first value is an Emacs Lisp integer, and the second and Emacs Lisp float. The pg-el library has ensured automatic type coercion from the SQL types to the most appropriate Emacs Lisp type.

The following example shows the output from a query that returns multiple rows. It returns a list of tuples, each tuple containing a single integer.

Note

A query that returns multiple rows

ELISP> (let ((res (pg-exec *pg* "SELECT * FROM generate_series(50,55)")))
          (pg-result res :tuples))
((50)
 (51)
 (52)
 (53)
 (54)
 (55))

An SQL query that returns no results will return the empty list.

ELISP> (let ((res (pg-exec *pg* "SELECT 3 where 1=0")))
         (pg-result res :tuples))
nil

For more, see the usage information and the API documentation.