Postgres is stuck when creating a database?

Question

I just installed Postgres on Ubuntu 20 on WSL. Both of the following are stuck forever:

CREATE DATABASE foo
WITH
OWNER = postgres      
ENCODING = 'UTF8'     
CONNECTION LIMIT = -1;

And:

sudo -u postgres createdb foo

The log doesn't have anything:

postgres@postgres ERROR:  canceling statement due to user request
postgres@postgres STATEMENT:  CREATE DATABASE foo
            WITH
            OWNER = postgres
            ENCODING = 'UTF8'
            CONNECTION LIMIT = -1;

What are some possible causes for this?

Restarting Postgres or restarting the computer doesn't help and there's no locks. I also tried manually killing every lock.

Answer 1

I had the same issue with you. It seems that it has to do with the wsl version. I was running wsl 1 so I had to uninstall ubuntu 20.04 wsl, then set the verion to 2 with the following command

wsl --set-default-version 2

and then install ubuntu 20.04 wsl again. Now everything seems to be in order and I am able to create databases with no issues.

Answer 2

There is a work around: Check you distros version by:

wsl -l -v

update the wsl version of you distros to 2 and then create the database it will get created.

Also other work arounds:

if you need to update the ubuntu switch back to wsl 1 and then update the ubuntu

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade 

after doing it switch back to wsl2

To update or degrade use the following commands:

Move to version 2:

wsl --set-version Ubuntu-22.04 2

Back to version 1:

wsl --set-version Ubuntu-22.04 1