Rails and PostgreSQL: Role postgres does not exist

Question

I have installed PostgreSQL on my Mac OS Lion, and am working on a rails app. I use RVM to keep everything separate from my other Rails apps.

For some reason when I try to migrate the db for the first time rake cannot find the postgres user. I get the error

 FATAL:  role "postgres" does not exist

I have pgAdmin so I can clearly see there is a postgres user in the DB - the admin account in fact - so I'm not sure what else to do.

I read somewhere about people having issues with PostgreSQL because of which path it was installed in, but then I don't think I would have gotten that far if it couldn't find the db.

Answer 1

You might be able to workaround this by running initdb -U postgres -D /path/to/data or running it as user postgres, since it defaults to the current user. GL!

Answer 2

I met this issue right on when I first install the Heroku's POSTGRES.app thing. After one morning trial and error i think this one line of code solved problem. As describe earlier, this is because postgresql does not have default role the first time it is set up. And we need to set that.

sovanlandy=# CREATE ROLE postgres LOGIN;

You must log in to your respective psql console to use this psql command.

Also noted that, if you already created the role 'postgre' but still get permission errors, you need to alter with command:

sovanlandy=# ALTER ROLE postgres LOGIN;

Hope it helps!

Answer 3

I ended up here after attempting to follow Ryan Bate's tutorial on deploying to AWS EC2 with rubber. Here is what happened for me: We created a new app using "

rails new blog -d postgresql

Obviosuly this creates a new app with pg as the database, but the database was not made yet. With sqlite, you just run rake db:migrate, however with pg you need to create the pg database first. Ryan did not do this step. The command is rake db:create:all, then we can run rake db:migrate

The second part is changing the database.yml file. The default for the username when the file is generated is 'appname'. However, chances are your role for postgresql admin is something different (at least it was for me). I changed it to my name (see above advice about creating a role name) and I was good to go.

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

Could you have multiple local databases? Check your database.yml and make sure you are hitting the pg db that you want. Use rails console to confirm.

Answer 5

This message pops up, when the database user does not exist. Compare the manual here.
Multiple local databases cannot be the explanation. Roles are valid cluster-wide. The manual again:

Note that roles are defined at the database cluster level, and so are valid in all databases in the cluster.

You must be ending up in another database-cluster. That would be another server running on the same machine, listening to a different port. Or, more likely, on a different machine.

Could it be that the message comes, in fact, from the remote server?

Answer 6

After a bunch of installing and uninstalling of Postgres, here's what now seems to work consistently for me with Os X Mavericks, Rails 4 and Ruby 2.

1. In the database.yml file, I change the default usernames to my computer's username which for me is just "admin".

2. In the command line I run rake db:create:all

3. Then I run rake db:migrate

4. When I run the rails server and check the local host it says "Welcome aboard".