I've been trying to set up PostgreSQL on my system (OSX 10.8, clean install), but I'm running into trouble with using psql
, createdb
, etc. I've tried various solutions and none seem to work.
The install was successful, and I proceeded to fix the known sockets issue using the following:
mkdir /var/pgsql_socket
sudo chown $USER /var/pgsql_socket
Then I edited postgresql.conf
, set unix_socket_directory
to
unix_socket_directory = '/var/pgsql_socket'
and restarted Pg.
That should apparently have fixed the socket issue, but I'm still getting:
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"?
Also, I've checked the status of the server, and it appears to be running, but I still get 'no such file or directory'
Any ideas?
According to the error message, the psql
command that appears first in the $PATH
has /tmp
as the hard-coded default unix socket directory.
Since the actual directory is in fact /var/pgsql_socket
, you should tell it explicitly rather than relying on the default:
$ psql -h /var/pgsql_socket [other options]
The same applies to other client-side commands like createdb
, dropdb
, createuser
...
If you don't want to specify -h
each time, it can be put into the PGHOST
environment variable.
Some people also solve this by using TCP connections to localhost
rather than using the Unix socket directory.
The root cause of this issue would be that after installing PostgreSQL on Mac OS X, the system ends up having two different instances of the postgres client set (the libpq
library, psql
and other associated utilities), one that is bundled with MacOS and the other that comes with the PostgreSQL installer.
Therefore yet another method is to change your $PATH
so that the psql
installed with PostgreSQL gets choosen before the one installed with the system (presumably /usr/bin/psql
).
I encountered this same issue when installing PostgreSQL 9.2 via Homebrew. psql
that comes with this build looks to /tmp
for a socket when called without any options.
I didn't feel like adding any new environment variables like PGHOST
or creating aliases for psql
. There's nothing wrong with doing any of these things, but I just didn't feel like adding to the clutter of my environment.
So, why not just set unix_socket_directory
in postgresql.conf
to /tmp
? I did:
unix_socket_directory = '/tmp' # (change requires restart)
#unix_socket_group = '' # (change requires restart)
#unix_socket_permissions = 0777 # begin with 0 to use octal notation
After a reload, I can just run $ psql
with no -h
option, without having added an alias or environment variable.
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