Postgres Postgis error: Library not loaded: /usr/local/lib/libspatialite.5.dylib

Question

While browsing through a Postgres-Rails app in development, I came across a page error-ing out due to a PG error. Thinking my current Git branch's schema may have been out of sync with my database, I attempted to rake db:reset. This caused an error (that I'm no longer able to reproduce) claiming it couldn't find the postgis.control file (IIRC) in usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.3.5/share/postgresql directory. After seeing that that control file existed in the corresponding directory for my 9.3.4 version of Postgres, I attempted many things, but eventually uninstalled my postgres-9.3.4 and brew uninstalled and then installed again PostGIS. At some point, though my every attempt to reset the database continued to fail, the error message changed to

ERROR: could not load library "/usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.3.5/lib/rtpostgis-2.1.so": dlopen(/usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.3.5/lib/rtpostgis-2.1.so, 10): Library not loaded: /usr/local/lib/libspatialite.5.dylib

I then attempted to uninstall Postgres and reinstall, but even this didn't solve the problem.

(Note: I have tried to create the extension to PostGIS in the Postgres console, but this has given the exact same error as what's listed above).

Answer 1

Alright figured it out!

So I'm not sure this was even something directly related to Postgres or PostGis.

In my initial post, I omitted the subsequent error lines which actually ended up being essential. They were

      Referenced from: /usr/local/lib/libgdal.1.dylib
      Reason: image not found

libgdal.1.dylib is a file from GDAL (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library). The missing file, libspatialite.5.dylib, is from SpatiaLite, a library for expanding SQLite. In /usr/local/lib/ I had another file, libspatialite.7.dylib, but no libspatialite.5.lib. After poking around in /usr/local/opt and other subdirectories around there, I found out that I had two versions of SpatiaLite, the earlier one using libspatialite.5.dylib, the later using libspatialite.7.lib.

It seemed my GDAL had gotten out of sync with my latest versions of spatialite. I executed

$ brew uninstall gdal
$ brew install gdal

and my problem was solved!