Repairing Postgresql after upgrading to OSX 10.7 Lion

Question

I recently upgraded to OSX 10.7, at which point my rails installation completely borked when trying to connect to the psql server. When I do it from the command line using

psql -U postgres

it works totally fine, but when I try to run the rails server or console with the same username and password, I get this error

...activerecord-3.0.9/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/postgresql_adapter.rb:950:in `initialize': could not connect to server: Permission denied (PGError) 
Is the server running locally and accepting
    connections on Unix domain socket "/var/pgsql_socket/.s.PGSQL.5432"?

Any ideas what might be going on would be super helpful! Thanks!

Answer 1

It's a PATH issue. Mac OSX Lion includes Postgresql in the system now. If you do a which psql you'll likely see usr/bin/psql instead of usr/local/bin/psql which is HomeBrew's correct one. If you run brew doctor you should get a message stating that you need to add usr/local/bin to the head of your PATH env variable.

Editing your .bash_profile or .profile, or whichever shell you're using and adding: export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

as the first export for the PATH then either quit you shell session or source your file with source ~/.bash_profile and it should now be OK again.