tilBuilding Postgres on Mac

While trying to install Postgres today, I thought it’d be fun to try 16.1 for the fun of it.

I ran the command with asdf as asdf install postgres 16.1

Turns out, Postgres updated things in update 16 (building with ic4uc by default now) and I kept getting this error:

checking for icu-uc icu-i18n... no
configure: error: ICU library not found
If you have ICU already installed, see config.log for details on the
failure.  It is possible the compiler isn't looking in the proper directory.
Use --without-icu to disable ICU support.

I found an article describing this exact issue on someone’s blog at https://viggy28.dev/article/postgres-v16-icu-installation-issue/

The solution was to run this following block instead:

export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/local/opt/icu4c/lib/pkgconfig/
asdf install postgres 16.1

Thanks a bunch Vignesh! It saved me a ton of time. I wonder if this would be what it felt like to use Stack Overflow 10 years ago.