NC

I’ve recently been picking up PostgreSQL. It’s very nice. Unfortunately, I had a few issues with it and Lion. Lion Server now uses Postgres as its default database (replacing MySQL), and consequently it looks like Apple included a bunch of tools in standard Lion, too.

Unfortunately, these clash a if you attempt to install and use the database daemon.

Install & Configure

To start with, install Postgres from Homebrew:

brew install postgres

Then (as told) initialise the database:

initdb /usr/local/var/postgres

But ignore the rest (as in, don’t add the LaunchAgent).

Next, it is necessary to adjust your $PATH slightly. On OS X, this is stored in /etc/paths. You need to push /usr/local/bin to be searched before /usr/bin. This will ensure that the homebrew compiled binaries are used instead of the system ones.

Control

The LaunchAgent step that was skipped is so that you can control Postgres yourself. If this is setup, it will interfere with the pg_ctl command. Usually, the LaunchAgent would be used to manage it all for you.

Starting/Stopping Postgres

pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres -l /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log start

pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres stop -s -m fast

These commands will start and stop Postgres, respectively. The -m fast flag on the stop command ignores the presence of other clients as it goes down.

Aliases

As these are a little long, I have these aliased to pgstart and pgstop. Done like this:

export PGDATA='/usr/local/var/postgres'
alias pgstart='pg_ctl -l $PGDATA/server.log start'
alias pgstop='pg_ctl stop -m fast'

So, there you go. That’s how to setup Postgres properly on Lion. My next challenge is to make libpq (the C library for Postgres) up and running.