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PostgreSQL 15 came out just last week. To celebrate the arrival of PostgreSQL 15, I will revisit the number one problem people have with PostGIS, how to upgrade your PostGIS enabled cluster, without installing an old PostGIS version.

In a previous article Using pg upgrade to upgrade PostGIS without installing older version I demonstrated a trick for upgrading to a newer PostgreSQL instance from PostGIS 2.2 - 2.whatever without having to install the older version of PostGIS in your new PostgreSQL service. This is a revisit of that article, but with considerations for upgrading from a 2 series to a 3 series.

Fear not. Going from PostGIS 2+ to PostGIS 3+ can still be done without installing the old PostGIS 2+ in your new cluster. Additionally once you are on PostGIS 3.1+, you should never have to do symlink or copy hacks to upgrade say PostGIS 3.1 to PostGIS 3.4. At least not for the same major version.

If per chance you are on PostGIS 1 and trying to jump all the way to PostGIS 3+, then sadly you need to do a pg_dump of your old database/cluster and pg_restore into your new cluster.

In a previous article Using pg upgrade to upgrade PostGIS without installing older version I demonstrated a trick for upgrading to a newer PostgreSQL instance from PostGIS 2.2 - 2.whatever without having to install the older version of PostGIS in your new PostgreSQL service. Unfortunately that trick does not work if coming from PostGIS 2.1 because in PostGIS 2.2 we renamed a c lib function that backed sql functions in 2.1.

Fear not. There is still a way to upgrade from 2.1 to 2.5 without installing an older version of PostGIS in your new PostgreSQL instance. To do so, you need to add a step and that is to remove the functions in 2.1 that are backed by this renamed lib function. In upcoming PostGIS 3.0, we've added this function back and have it throw an error so that even coming from PostGIS 2.1, you can upgrade just the same as you do from later versions.