Installing plv8 on Windows Edit on GitHub

In order to use the JavaScript functions, you need to install plv8. The Windows install of PostgreSQL 9.5 / 9.6, and possibly future versions, do not come with plv8 installed.

If you attempt to install the extension for your database:

CREATE EXTENSION plv8;

You may be greeted with the following:

sql> create extension plv8
[2016-12-06 22:53:22] [58P01] ERROR: could not open extension control file "C:/Program Files/PostgreSQL/9.5/share/extension/plv8.control": No such file or directory

This means that the plv8 extension isn't installed so you're unable to create it in the database for usage.

Download

You can download the appropriate binaries for PostgreSQL 9.5/PostgreSQL 9.6 from:

PLV8-binaries-for-PostgreSQL-9.5-windows-both-32-bit-and-64-bit

PLV8-binaries-for-PostgreSQL-9.6beta1-windows-both-32-bit-and-64-bit

PLV8-binaries-for-PostgreSQL-10-windows-both-32-bit-and-64-bit

xTuple-PLV8-binaries-for-PostgreSQL-9.4-to-12-windows-64-bit

Download the version that corresponds to the version of PostgreSQL you installed (32 or 64 bit)

Install

Distributions from Postgres Online

The zip should contain 3 folders:

Move the contents of bin to:

C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.5\bin

Move the contents of lib to:

C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.5\lib

Move the contents of share/extension to:

C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL\9.5\share\extension

The Program Files and 9.5 folders should correspond to the bit and version of PostgreSQL you installed. For example if you installed the 32 bit version of 9.6 then your path would be:

C:\Program Files (x86)\PostgreSQL\9.6\

Distributions from xTuple

The zip contains the folders for all the supported versions and the install_plv8.bat file.

Run the batch file from a command window running in administrative mode and provide the path for your Postgres installation.

Create Extension

Once you have moved all the files to the correct folder, you can now call the create extension again:

CREATE EXTENSION plv8;

This time you should get the message like:

sql> create extension plv8
[2016-12-06 23:12:10] completed in 2s 271ms

If you get the below error while using the xTuple distribution

ERROR: syntax error in file "path_to_/plv8.control" line 1, near token "" SQL state: 42601

You need to ensure that the plv8.control is encoded with UTF-8. This is easiest to do with Notepad++.

Testing out the extension

To test out the extension you can create a super basic function which manipulates a string input and returns the value.

create or replace function test_js_func(value text) returns text as $$

    var thing = 'I\' a JavaScript string';

    var result = thing.replace(/JavaScript/g, value);

    return result;

$$ language plv8;

Then we can invoke it:

select test_js_func('Manipulated');

And we should get a result that reads:

I' a Manipulated string

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