Postgres, a fresh install of Mavericks and rails. Cannot fix this database connection issue...

Question

There are a few other issues similar to this on stack overflow however they don't fix it and are not related to Mavericks, I think this is a Mavericks specific issue.

I have a fresh install of Mavericks and I have brew installed postgres however I’m getting a strange error when running my rails app:

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

Postgres is up and running, I can view the whole database in the command line. Rails console also throws this error.

There is a /tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432.lock file that looks similar t othe one this is looking for.

There is no .s.PGSQL.5432 file in the directory it’s looking for.

In my database.yml in rails I have the host set as localhost.

Can anyone tell me what this error is about and how to fix it please.

Answer 1

Your client (psql or whatever) is configured to look for unix sockets in /var/run but your server is using /tmp. This suggests that your psql is an old version rather than whatever you compiled - check your PATH.

You can use the path as a hostname:

psql -h /tmp -p 5432 ...