Question

So I’m a newbie to Rails who’s only used SQLite3 before, and I’m struggling to even run a simple rake command when using PostgreSQL.

I’m just trying to follow the first 5 minutes of this screencast on installing Postgres: http://railscasts.com/episodes/342-migrating-to-postgresql

But even when I’ve done everything as instructed, when I run rake db:create:all I get the ubiquitous error message:

could not connect to server: Permission denied
Is the server running locally and accepting
connections on Unix domain socket "/var/pgsql_socket/.s.PGSQL.5432"?

I see this everywhere, but can someone answer this definitively, once and for all (if such a task were so simple)?

I used homebrew to install PostgreSQL.

When I run which psql, it says i’m using the one in usr/bin/psql, which I believe is the one that is native to Mac OSX Lion (isn’t that a bad thing? How do I switch to the one installed by homebrew, which is in usr/local/bin/psql?).

I’m fairly certain Postgres is at least running: when I run ps auxw | grep postgres, I get my four processes, such as:

postgres: stats collector process
postgres: autovacuum launcher process
postgres: wal writer process
postgres: writer process

And I was even able to install my pg gem just fine. I’ve been spending all day just trying to get Postgres to run, I appreciate any and all help!

EDIT (WITH SOLUTION):

Referencing this link:

Repairing Postgresql after upgrading to OSX 10.7 Lion

There was indeed a path issue. So I edited my .bash_profile as instructed, and switched from using my native psql installation in usr/bin/psql to the one installed by homebrew, usr/local/bin/psql.

Then, I uninstalled my pg gem, and then reinstalled it, and then rake dr:create:all started working. 🙂

EDIT 2:

Actually, I’m still having loads of problems! This is so frustrating! 🙂

Answer 1

Your permissions are probably messed up. Try

sudo chmod -R 777 /var/pgsql_socket/

This gives open permissions to everyone, so it’s fine for your development server needs.

Now it should work.