Name

pg_archivecleanup — clean up PostgreSQL™ WAL archive files

Synopsis

pg_archivecleanup [option...] archivelocation oldestkeptwalfile

Description

pg_archivecleanup is designed to be used as an archive_cleanup_command to clean up WAL file archives when running as a standby server (see the section called “Log-Shipping Standby Servers”). pg_archivecleanup can also be used as a standalone program to clean WAL file archives.

To configure a standby server to use pg_archivecleanup, put this into its recovery.conf configuration file:

archive_cleanup_command = 'pg_archivecleanup archivelocation %r'

where archivelocation is the directory from which WAL segment files should be removed.

When used within archive_cleanup_command, all WAL files logically preceding the value of the %r argument will be removed from archivelocation. This minimizes the number of files that need to be retained, while preserving crash-restart capability. Use of this parameter is appropriate if the archivelocation is a transient staging area for this particular standby server, but not when the archivelocation is intended as a long-term WAL archive area, or when multiple standby servers are recovering from the same archive location.

When used as a standalone program all WAL files logically preceding the oldestkeptwalfile will be removed from archivelocation. In this mode, if you specify a .backup file name, then only the file prefix will be used as the oldestkeptwalfile. This allows you to remove all WAL files archived prior to a specific base backup without error. For example, the following example will remove all files older than WAL file name 000000010000003700000010:

pg_archivecleanup -d archive 000000010000003700000010.00000020.backup

pg_archivecleanup:  keep WAL file "archive/000000010000003700000010" and later
pg_archivecleanup:  removing file "archive/00000001000000370000000F"
pg_archivecleanup:  removing file "archive/00000001000000370000000E"

pg_archivecleanup assumes that archivelocation is a directory readable and writable by the server-owning user.