Installation

pg_exporter can be installed via Pigsty, YUM/APT repositories, GitHub release packages (RPM/DEB/Tarball), Docker images, or built from source — pick whichever fits your infrastructure.

Pigsty

The easiest way to get started with pg_exporter is to use Pigsty, which is a complete PostgreSQL distribution with built-in Observability best practices based on pg_exporter, Prometheus, and Grafana. You don’t even need to know any details about pg_exporter; it just gives you all the metrics and dashboard panels.

curl -fsSL https://repo.pigsty.io/get | bash; cd ~/pigsty;

Release

You can also download pg_exporter package (RPM/DEB/ Tarball) directly from the Latest GitHub Release Page:

v1.4.1 Release Files:

You can install it directly with your OS package manager (rpm/dpkg), or just place the binary in your $PATH. Current tarballs also include pg_exporter.yml, package/pg_exporter.default, package/pg_exporter.service, and LICENSE for manual deployments.

Full SHA256 checksums are available in checksums.txt on the release page; version-specific checksums are also archived in the release notes.

Repository

The pg_exporter package is also available in the pigsty-infra repo. You can add the repo to your system and install it with your OS package manager:

YUM

For EL distributions such as RHEL, Rocky Linux, CentOS, AlmaLinux, and Oracle Linux:

sudo tee /etc/yum.repos.d/pigsty-infra.repo > /dev/null <<-'EOF'
[pigsty-infra]
name=Pigsty Infra for $basearch
baseurl=https://repo.pigsty.io/yum/infra/$basearch
enabled = 1
gpgcheck = 0
module_hotfixes=1
EOF

sudo yum makecache;
sudo yum install -y pg_exporter

APT

For Debian, Ubuntu and compatible Linux Distributions:

sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pigsty-infra.list > /dev/null <<EOF
deb [trusted=yes] https://repo.pigsty.io/apt/infra generic main
EOF

sudo apt update;
sudo apt install -y pg-exporter

Docker

We have prebuilt docker images for amd64 and arm64 architectures on docker hub: pgsty/pg_exporter.

# Basic usage
docker run -d \
  --name pg_exporter \
  -p 9630:9630 \
  -e PG_EXPORTER_URL="postgres://user:password@host:5432/postgres" \
  pgsty/pg_exporter:latest

# With custom configuration
docker run -d \
  --name pg_exporter \
  -p 9630:9630 \
  -v /path/to/pg_exporter.yml:/etc/pg_exporter.yml:ro \
  -e PG_EXPORTER_CONFIG="/etc/pg_exporter.yml" \
  -e PG_EXPORTER_URL="postgres://user:password@host:5432/postgres" \
  pgsty/pg_exporter:latest

# With auto-discovery enabled
docker run -d \
  --name pg_exporter \
  -p 9630:9630 \
  -e PG_EXPORTER_URL="postgres://user:password@host:5432/postgres" \
  -e PG_EXPORTER_AUTO_DISCOVERY="true" \
  -e PG_EXPORTER_EXCLUDE_DATABASE="template0,template1" \
  pgsty/pg_exporter:latest

Compatibility

The default configuration supports PostgreSQL 10-19+. For EOL PostgreSQL versions, use the bundled legacy/ config package for compatible monitoring.

Legacy config example:

make conf9
PG_EXPORTER_CONFIG=legacy/pg_exporter.yml pg_exporter

pg_exporter works with pgBouncer 1.8+, since v1.8 is the first version with SHOW command support.