Homebrew postgres broken

Question

I installed Postgresql 9.4.0 installed on my Mac (10.10.1/Yosemite) using homebrew. It does not work.

I have created the softlink to /usr/local/opt/postgresql/homebrew.mxcl.postgresql.plist in ~/Library/LaunchAgents.

If I try to manually load postgres I get the message that the "Operation is in progress"

> launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.postgresql.plist
/usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.4.0/homebrew.mxcl.postgresql.plist: Operation already in progress

However postgres does not appear to be running.

> ps auxw | grep post
billmcn           670   0.0  0.0  2424272    452 s000  R+   10:12PM   0:00.01 grep post

and I cannot connect with the command line client.

> psql
psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory
    Is the server running locally and accepting
    connections on Unix domain socket "/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432"?

To my knowledge I have tried all the fixes suggested on other Stackoverflow threads discussing this problem. Specifically:

• I have uninstalled and reinstalled postgres and the accompanying Ruby gem. There is no postgres 8.0 version on my machine.
• I have verified that the psql client program is the 9.4.0 version installed by Homebrew and not a Mac system binary.
• I have verified that the /usr/local/var/postgres/postmaster.pid does not exist.
• I have rebooted the machine.

I did have Homebrew postgres working on this machine earlier. I think what broke it is upgrading from version 8 to version 9 but I'm not sure.

I don't have any databases I need to preserve. I'm willing to start clean with postgres; I just need to get it to work now. Any ideas?

---

The issue appears to have been permissions on the /usr/local/var/postgres directory. Here is what my var directory looked like when things weren't working.

ll /usr/local/var/
drwxr-xr-x  3 billmcn  admin  102 Dec 20 12:44 cache
drwxr--r--  2 root     admin   68 Dec 29 21:37 postgres

(whoami = "billmcn")

I deleted /usr/local/var/postgres, uninstalled and reinstalled postgres, and now it looks like this.

ll /usr/local/var/
drwxr-xr-x   3 billmcn  admin  102 Dec 20 12:44 cache
drwx------  23 billmcn  admin  782 Dec 30 10:51 postgres

Not sure how it got into this state because I don't remember futzing with the permissions on this directory, but no matter. It works now.

Answer 1

I had this same problem. The primary issue here is that the initdb step of installation will create the directory with root ownership instead of as the user on a Mac. To solve this issue:

Create the data directory before running initdb and set permissions of 0700

rm -rf /usr/local/var/postgres  # in case this is not your first try
mkdir /usr/local/var/postgres
chmod 0700 /usr/local/var/postgres

Then run initdb and it will respect the permissions of the data directory.

initdb -D /usr/local/var/postgres

For grins and giggles, create a test db named after your user:

createdb `whoami`

Login to test:

psql

Answer 2

After trying to install postgresql with Homebrew, I got this:

Warning: postgresql-9.5.2 already installed, it's just not linked

So I tried:

brew link postgresql

And got this error:

Linking /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.5.2... 
Error: Could not symlink share/man/man3/SPI_connect.3
/usr/local/share/man/man3 is not writable.

It seemed to be a write permission matter, so I did:

sudo chown -R `whoami` /usr/local/share/man/

It did the trick because, then I was able to do (without error):

brew link postgresql

Answer 3

I had the same problem installing postgres using homebrew on a freshly installed Yosemite.

First off my brew config looks like this:

HOMEBREW_VERSION: 0.9.5
ORIGIN: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew
HEAD: 9f6926265f8e4be7cc80dfe9042f2cd3c1e8dc9e
Last commit: 64 minutes ago
HOMEBREW_PREFIX: /usr/local
HOMEBREW_CELLAR: /usr/local/Cellar
CPU: quad-core 64-bit sandybridge
OS X: 10.10.1-x86_64
Xcode: 6.1.1
Clang: 6.0 build 600
X11: N/A
System Ruby: 2.0.0-481
Perl: /usr/bin/perl
Python: /usr/bin/python
Ruby: ~/.rvm/rubies/ruby-2.1.1/bin/ruby

First thing i noticed was that I had no write permission to /usr/local/var/postgres. This was easily changed issuing sudo chown -R `whoami` /usr/local/var/postgres then I reinstalled postgresql and did

cat /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log

which revealed:

postgres cannot access the server configuration file "/usr/local/var/postgres/postgresql.conf": No such file or directory

So I removed the directory /usr/local/var/postgres and issued the command to initialize the database.

initdb -D /usr/local/var/postgres/

This seemed to have done the trick and postgres is running fine.

Answer 4

Please note that their is a thread on Homebrew's github dealing with this issue: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/issues/35240

---

I have had a similar issue. James answer helped me solve it. But I then ran into the issue jbk is mentioning (after having deleted /usr/local/var/postgres, it kept on being recreated).

The issue is that if you have created the symlink:

ln -sfv /usr/local/opt/postgresql/*.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents

and launched the process:

launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.postgresql.plist

you should first unload it:

launchctl unload ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.postgresql.plist

before running James's commands.

rm -rf /usr/local/var/postgres  # in case this is not your first try
mkdir /usr/local/var/postgres
chmod 0700 /usr/local/var/postgres

In addition, if, like me, you have an admin user managing homebrew and a regular user who will be using pgsl for development purpose, James command should be run as super user:

sudo -s

and ownership over the postgres directory should be given to your dev user:

chown my-dev-user /usr/local/var/postgres

The following command, run as the dev user, should then properly populate the directory:

createdb `whoami`

Running:

psql -l

should show you the tables and user permissions in postgre after such manipulations.

Hope this helps.

Answer 5

Check @leo_chaz_maltrait for fixing errors the error Could not symlink share/man/man3/SPI_connect.3 Another error that might show up is:

Error: Could not symlink lib/pkgconfig/libecpg.pc

sudo chown -R `whoami` /usr/local/lib/pkgconfig

brew link postgresql