Question

I am having trouble getting postgresql getting set up on Mac OSX Lion. I used brew to install postgres, but there is also a default installed postgres on Lion so I don’t know if that is the problem. Here is my attempt to start the server, which appears to work but then I can’t access psql. I also created a user called “postgres” but I am not sure what exactly to do with it.

    Superfly:~ James$ pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres -l /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log start
    server starting
    Superfly:~ James$ ps aux | grep postgres
    postgres       18990   0.0  0.0  2435492   1044 s000  S     7:52PM   0:00.01 bash
    root           18989   0.0  0.0  2446896   1848 s000  S     7:52PM   0:00.02 su postgres
    James          19310   0.0  0.0  2434892    544 s001  S+    8:16PM   0:00.00 grep postgres
    Superfly:~ James$ psql -U postgres
    psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
        Is the server running locally and accepting
        connections on Unix domain socket "/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432"?

Here is where pg_ctl and psql are installed on my computer.

Superfly:~ James$ which psql
/usr/local/bin/psql
Superfly:~ James$ which pg_ctl
/usr/local/bin/pg_ctl

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Which user did you run that as? Brew gives instructions after you install, did you run those commands? You need to run the pg_ctl as postgres user. I don’t know why you didn’t get error messages but you need to give the data directory.