Cannot create a new table after "DROP SCHEMA public"

Question

Since I wanted to drop some tables and somebody suggested the below and I did it:

postgres=# drop schema public cascade;
DROP SCHEMA
postgres=# create schema public;
CREATE SCHEMA

Then I got problem when creating a new database, such as:

postgres=# create database test;
CREATE DATABASE
postgres=# \c test
You are now connected to database "test" as user "postgres".
test=# create table hi(id int primary key);
*ERROR:  no schema has been selected to create in*

You can see I got error

ERROR: no schema has been selected to create in*

How can I restore the public schema?
I suggest people never do "drop schema public cascade;" if we don't know how to restore. Can somebody help me out?

Answer 1

The error message pops up when none of the schemas in your search_path can be found.
Either it is misconfigured. What do you get for this?

SHOW search_path;

Or you deleted the public schema from your standard system database template1. You may have been connected to the wrong database when you ran drop schema public cascade;

As the name suggests, this is the template for creating new databases. Therefore, every new database starts out without the (default) schema public now - while your default search_path probably has 'public' in it.

Just run (as superuser public or see mgojohn's answer):

CREATE SCHEMA public;

in the database template1 (or any other database where you need it).

The advice with DROP SCHEMA ... CASCADE to destroy all objects in it quickly is otherwise valid.