Postgres: MacOS

Troubleshooting for MacOS Postgres Issues

Postgres via Homebrew

To reinstall: brew reinstall postgresql
To start daemon: brew services start postgres
Get rid of all databases (dangerous): rm -rf /usr/local/var/postgres
Reinitialize all databases: `initdb /usr/local/var/postgres -E utf8
Access CLI: psql

Upgrading PostgresQL on Mac

When upgrading PostgreSQL on Mac, you may run into this error:

The binaries for this PostgreSQL server were not found

The website http://postgresapp.com/documentation/troubleshooting.html has some information about this error that is helpful, but in my experience, insufficient to solve the problem. Here’s the missing piece.

The solution, which I stumbled across, is this. In the app, you have screen that looks like this. There is a magic button at the bottom that would easily go unnoticed, that opens a side panel.

postgres.app.png

On the side panel, you’ll see that you can add and delete servers. The problem The binaries for this PostgreSQL server were not found occured for me because the server that my Postgres app was trying to open was pointing to version 9.4 of the binaries, which no longer existed on my system after I upgraded. You can see which versions you do have on your system by looking under /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/ (that’s the part the website gets right.)

Phills-MacBook-Pro:pconrad-webapps.github.io pconrad$ ls /Applications/Postgres.app/Contents/Versions/
9.5	9.6	latest
Phills-MacBook-Pro:pconrad-webapps.github.io pconrad$ 

It appears that I have 9.5 and 9.6. So I created a new server for version 9.6, like this:

postgres.click.plus.png

postgres.app.create.new.server.png