Postgres.app Could not start on port 5432

Question

I'm using http://postgresapp.com. In the menubar it gives the error " Could not start on port 5432." Similarly if I try to start the server from the terminal, I get:

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"? 

I also ran pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres -l /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log start and got the output server starting but still get the same errors when connecting to psql.

Answer 1

If you are running your server on a macOS machine and installed Postgres through Homebrew, you can stop the current instance like this:

brew services stop postgresql

Then click the Elephant in the native menu-bar at the top of the screen and it should successfully startup.

Answer 2

You can stop the process by finding the PID with

lsof -i :5432 

and then killing it with

kill -9 <PID>