Brew Install Postgresql on OS X Lion

– September 4, 2011Posted in: Development

The Problem

If you’re installing postgresql via homebrew on Lion you might be encountering errors like these:

psql: 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"?

createuser: could not connect to database postgres: 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"?

The Cause

Lion comes with a version of postgres already installed and uses those binaries by default. In general you can get around this by using the full path to the homebrew postgres binaries but there may be still issues with other programs.

The Solution

If a quick fix is all you’re looking for, run this:

curl http://nextmarvel.net/blog/downloads/fixBrewLionPostgres.sh | sh

Here’s the code the previous line runs. To sum up, it moves your OS X default postgres binaries into an archive folder and symlinks the homebrew versions in place of them.

BREW_POSTGRES_DIR=`brew info postgres | awk '{print $1"/bin"}' | grep "/postgresql/"`
LION_POSTGRES_DIR=`which postgres | xargs dirname`
LION_PSQL_DIR=`which psql | xargs dirname`

sudo mkdir -p $LION_POSTGRES_DIR/archive
sudo mkdir -p $LION_PSQL_DIR/archive

for i in `ls $BREW_POSTGRES_DIR`
do
	if [ -f $LION_POSTGRES_DIR/$i ]
	then
		sudo mv $LION_POSTGRES_DIR/$i $LION_POSTGRES_DIR/archive/$i
		sudo ln -s $BREW_POSTGRES_DIR/$i $LION_POSTGRES_DIR/$i
	fi

	if [ -f $LION_PSQL_DIR/$i ]
	then
		sudo mv $LION_PSQL_DIR/$i $LION_PSQL_DIR/archive/$i
		sudo ln -s $BREW_POSTGRES_DIR/$i $LION_PSQL_DIR/$i
	fi
done

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About Paul

PHP, RoR, JS, Obj-C Developer working at @hellofax and @nextmarvel. Father of 2, husband of 1. Follow me at http://twitter.com/pdenya

Michael Nichols

Thank you so much! I’ve spent hours trying to figure this out.
http://twitter.com/danhixon Dan Hixon

muchas gracias!

I just prepended /usr/local/bin to my PATH. I may regret that later. Of course had I known that Lion ships with postgres 9 I may have tried to use that first.
Asdfasdf

On Mac OS X Lion, vi /etc/paths and move /usr/local/bin to the top. Save, exit terminal, type brew doctor and you should see something that says, “raring in brew”. If you run brew doctor before modifying paths, you will see an error from brew.

Anonymous

more practical this.
Janko

This fixes it. Thanks a lot.
Anonymous

Really nice advice!

Wouiu

Yes, i have this problem. When i print

“createdb mydb” i get your error.

When i try
”
curl http://nextmarvel.net/blog/downloads/fixBrewLionPostgres.sh | sh”"sh: line 3: brew: command not found”

What is wrong? I do it on Mac OS X Lion.

http://twitter.com/pdenya Paul Denya

If you’re getting a brew not found error you haven’t installed homebrew on your system so the problem is something to do with the OS X Lion postgres install. I wasn’t able to get it working myself so I installed homebrew via: http://mxcl.github.com/homebrew/ and then used it to install postgres.

Anonymous

Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for!
http://twitter.com/ehrlicp Peter Ehrlich

!important — if you already ran bundle install, pg needs to be reinstalled to recognize the correct version:
gem uninstall pg
gem install pg
via: http://tammersaleh.com/posts/installing-postgresql-for-rails-3-1-on-lion
James

Awesome, worked great. All I had to do is uninstall and reinstall pg gem.
Pedr

Thanks!
Mike

Thank you very much for posting this script. It ended about an hour of frustration trying to get postgres installed on my iMac.
Faizan

Accidentally ran the script twice and I think it has wiped the system Postgres installation. Does anyone know if I should consider reinstalling Lion? Thanks.
Anentropic

Thank you so much!! Fixed this mystifying problem for me
0101

Nothing happened when I did this, I just ran brew install postgres (MacBook Air 2011) and ran the 3 commands on the post install info to automatically start the server.
David Frey

This is a lifesaver; however, I discovered I had mismatch problems that surfaced when trying to use pg_dump, so I found the following pattern useful for tracking down binaries manually:

ls -1 `which pg_dump | xargs dirname`/pg*

In my case I still had pg_config, pg_dump, pg_dumpall, pg_restore, and pg_upgrade left behind in /usr/bin, probably due to some tinkering before stumbling onto your shell script.
http://twitter.com/karlmendes Karl Mendes

Thank you!
Wez

Thanks dude. This sorted me out.
hep1989

hi didn’t work for me..looking for help

Brew Install Postgresql on OS X Lion

The Problem

The Cause

The Solution

About Paul

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Brew Install Postgresql on OS X Lion

The Problem

The Cause

The Solution

About Paul

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