Installing PostgreSQL via Homebrew

This is mostly for my edification only with little potential value for any one other than the Google overlords but maybe it will come in handy in the future.

Today, I thought I’d do some Rails dev on my football website but when I fired up rails s, I got an error related to PostgreSQL and the associated gem file. I haven’t done any rails work in 3 months but I’m pretty sure when I last left things, Postgres was working just fine. I rooted around a little in the path from the exception and apparently, Postgres had disappeared from the location the gem expected it to be in. I have no idea how that happened but that was the situation I found myself in. I spent an hour or two trying to find an installation for Postgres with little luck and finally just gave up and went to installing it with Homebrew.

I followed steps 1, 2, 4 and 5 from this link on upgrading PostgreSQL via Homebrew. One difference was because I wasn’t upgrading, I actually did a clean install with Homebrew. When I did this, the default user created was the same as my logged in user account instead of the standard “postgres” account. I couldn’t connect to the database server via pgAdmin because it wasn’t running so steps 4 and 5 came in handy. Homebrew installed Postgres in /usr/local/var/postgres. Once I copied my plist file from that location to Library/LaunchAgents and ran pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres/ start, the server was back in business and I could connect with pgAdmin.

I then created the postgres login role and was back in business. rails s started fine and after several hours of learning about things like ps, launchctl and psql, I should be able to start writing some code.