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Comment by approachingtraj | Hacker News Reader

> Instead of resorting to those hacks, follow the PostgreSQL documentation[1] to do it the right way. The simplest way is to initialize your PostgreSQL database cluster as:

This is actually poor advice. The right way on Ubuntu is to use the packages provided by PostgreSQL Development Group (https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Apt), and in that setup you use pg_createcluster instead of initdb.

The snippet in the original article was so hacky because it fixed an existing cluster instead of destroying it and creating a new one in UTF-8.

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> This is actually poor advice. The right way on Ubuntu is to use the packages provided by PostgreSQL Development Group (https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Apt), and in that setup you use pg_createcluster instead of initdb.

initdb is part of standard PostgreSQL utilities/tools[1] for initializing your PostgreSQL server that's why I suggested using it. On the other hand, I don't see any reference to pg_createcluster command in the official PostgreSQL documentation. So I don't know why you think using a non-standard PostgreSQL tool (in place of a standard one i.e. initdb) is the right way of initializing a PostgreSQL database cluster.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.5/static/reference-server....

Since we're talking about Ubuntu, I would use the Ubuntu tools. They make it very easy to maintain several Postgres clusters side-by-side, e.g. /var/lib/postgresql/9.4/main vs /var/lib/postgresql/9.5/main. You can also control which binaries you use with the PGCLUSTER variable, like this:

    PGCLUSTER=9.4/main pg_dump foo
    PGCLUSTER=9.5/main pg_dump foo

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