I downloaded PostgreSQL from the official website and ran the .dmg installer. After that I downloaded pgadmin3 and I am indeed able to connect to the database.
when I run 'psql' I get the following error:
psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
Is the server running locally and accepting
After hours of googling I read about some $PATH issues, so I put this into my .bashrc:
export PATH=/Library/PostgreSQL/9.1/bin:$PATH
However, this doesn't solve the error above at all. After some more hours of googling I tried to run 'psql -l localhost -U postgres'. This gives another error:
psql: could not connect to server: Connection refused
Is the server running on host "localhost" (::1) and accepting
TCP/IP connections on port 5432?
could not connect to server: Connection refused
Is the server running on host "localhost" (127.0.0.1) and accepting
TCP/IP connections on port 5432?
could not connect to server: Connection refused
Is the server running on host "localhost" (fe80::1) and accepting
TCP/IP connections on port 5432?
After some more googling I tried to edit /Library/PostgreSQL/9.1/data/pg_hba.conf and replaced all occurrences of 'md5' with 'trust'.
Then I changed user to postgres and executed 'pg_ctl stop' and 'pg_ctl start', switched back to my own user and tried to connect again, no luck.
Here are some more infos:
[~]$ which psql
/Library/PostgreSQL/9.1/bin/psql
ps aux | grep postgres
postgres 19022 0.0 0.0 2446096 484 ?? Ss 11:31PM 0:00.01 postgres: stats collector process
postgres 19021 0.0 0.0 2486532 1776 ?? Ss 11:31PM 0:00.01 postgres: autovacuum launcher process
postgres 19020 0.0 0.0 2486400 576 ?? Ss 11:31PM 0:00.03 postgres: wal writer process
postgres 19019 0.0 0.0 2486400 820 ?? Ss 11:31PM 0:00.05 postgres: writer process
postgres 19017 0.0 0.0 2446096 356 ?? Ss 11:31PM 0:00.01 postgres: logger process
postgres 19015 0.0 0.1 2486400 8216 s001 S 11:31PM 0:00.17 /Library/PostgreSQL/9.1/bin/postgres
sudo find / -name .s.PGSQL.5432
No file was found?!?
Update 1: In /etc/sysctl.conf I added the values suggested by the installer's README:
kern.sysv.shmmax=1610612736
kern.sysv.shmall=393216
kern.sysv.shmmin=1
kern.sysv.shmmni=32
kern.sysv.shmseg=8
kern.maxprocperuid=512
Before these settings, the installer quits with an error, afterwards the wizard appears and installs postgres (and again, using pgadmin3 works, so I assume that the database is running fine).