Question

I have been using the default sqlite3 to date, however as I would ultimately like to deploy using postgres I think it would be best to try it out in my development environment rather than launching myself into production untested.

Several points
a) once i have the pg.app running, how do test it?
b) in my config/database.yml file

development:
  adapter: postgresql
  encoding: unicode
  database: 
  pool: 5
  username:
  password:

how do i know what the default name of my database is, and how would I got about setting up a user, is this even necessary?

Finally, when i check

which psql

I am told that

/usr/bin/psql

I think that this PATH is incorrect that I will need to modify it, is this so and if so why?

Im sure this is relatively simple but thanks in advance for any help you can offer.

EDIT 1:

During my error googling, and prior attempts, I shot up a similar error to this chap
Repairing Postgresql after upgrading to OSX 10.7 Lion
and thought that it may be a similar problem despite the fact that he is using homebrew?

EDIT 2:

My .bash_profile file

[[ -s “$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm” ]] && . “$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm” # Load RVM function
export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Answer 1

A few things you need to do to get postgres.app up and running. It looks like you are using the default postgres install with Mac OS X /usr/bin/psql which is good as it should be easy to get this fixed.

The main action is to make sure that the path to the postgres.app is set in your PATH. Your .profile, .bashrc or .zshrc (whichever you use) should have the following appended to the start of your Path with the following.

export PATH="/Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/MacOS/bin:$PATH"

This will ensure that postgres.app is used in preference to any other install by prepending it to your current path. You shouldn’t need any other config,

The second action is to set up your database.yml. Postgres.app comes pre-configured with your local Mac username so you don’t need to add or change it for everything to just work. You also don’t need to specify it in database.yml. Development should work with the following:

development:
  adapter: postgresql
  host: localhost
  encoding: unicode
  database: appname_development

Postgres.app will auto create the database that has been specified when you migrate the database for the first time. The name of your database is up to you but the convention is application_name underscore environment.