Fixing a broken postgis raster install

As of PostGIS 3.0, the PostGIS raster support is no longer part of the postgis extension, but instead spun off into a PostGIS extension called postgis_raster.

Upgrading raster from 2.* to 3.* covers the proper way of upgrading your install from PostGIS 2+ to PostGIS 3+.

Unfortunately many people in a heat of panic when seeing the notice “UNPACKAGED” in their check of

SELECT postgis_full_extension()

tried to do something like drop raster type with cascade. Dropping the raster type DOES NOT remove all the raster functions, but DOES destroy all your raster data if you had any. Do not do that. But if you did happen to do that, this solution is for you.

The only solution after breaking your raster install is to remove the remaining bits of the postgis raster functionality. At that point, you can reinstall using CREATE EXENSION postgis_raster, or not bother if you don’t need raster support.

How do you know your raster install is broken?

If you run:

ALTER EXTENSION postgis UPDATE;

-- yes run it twice
SELECT postgis_extensions_upgrade();
SELECT postgis_extensions_upgrade();

and then check

SELECT postgis_full_version();

and you still see the message RASTER (raster lib from "2.5.3 r17699" need upgrade) [UNPACKAGED!]

You’ve broken your raster functionality so badly, it can’t be upgraded.

First before doing anything, confirm you have no raster tables. The below query should either error out or return 0:

SELECT count(1) FROM raster_columns;

To fix this issue, run the script uninstall_rtpostgis.sql. It should remove even older versions of postgis raster functions, since the function sets of older versions are generally a subset of the 2.5.

Now to confirm it is all gone, run the below again.

SELECT postgis_full_version();

You should now see no mention of RASTER or GDAL.