Postgres Dev Setup for MacOS
PostgreSQL setup & default ‘postgres’ user configuration for MacOS
Franco Posa
Published 2020-03-29 · Updated 2024-11-17
Why Install with postgres as the Default User?
Most MacOS Postgres install guides will recommend a standard brew install in order to get up and running, but this common setup method has a flaw: the first, default superuser created on the Postgres instance will be your MacOS username.
This differs from a standard install on Linux environments where the original superuser name is postgres, and this minor difference can have its costs.
Not only will configurations differ between your MacOS Postgres and your Linux servers or Docker containers, but most how-tos, Stack Overflow answers, and troubleshooting tips you find will operate under the assumption that postgres is the superuser on any Postgres instance. Further, this initial superuser is nearly impossible to rename or remove later on as it owns the system tables essential to Postgres’ inner workers.
Fortunately, we can avoid this all with a slight modification to the common install approach.
0. Do Not Install Anything! (Yet)
The standard brew install approach will automatically run a post_install step that initializes the Postgres instance, naming the default user as your MacOS username.
See the post_install step in the source code for the Homebrew postgres formula here.
1. Install Postgres with Homebrew
We will avoid automatically running the post-install step by installing with the --build-bottle option.
From the Homebrew man pages:
--build-bottle: Prepares the formula for eventual bottling during installation, skipping any post-install steps.
It is not the sole intended purpose of the --build-bottle option to skip post-install steps, but it works well enough for our purposes.
This method builds Postgres from the source files, so it may take a few minutes.
% brew install --build-bottle postgres
Upon completion, Homebrew will print out:
==> Not running post_install as we're building a bottle
You can run it manually using `brew postinstall postgresql`
This is exactly what we wanted - no post_install step was run.
However, Homebrew will also print out some inaccurate info that does not apply
when the post_install steps are not run:
This formula has created a default database cluster with:
initdb --locale=C -E UTF-8 /usr/local/var/postgres
For more details, read:
https://www.postgresql.org/docs/13/app-initdb.html
The cluster has not actually been initialized yet - we will handle that manually in the next step, with help from the same initdb documentation link that Homebrew printed out.
2. Initialize Postgres with postgres as the Default User
The solution is alluded to by the inaccurate Homebrew output above, as well as the PostgreSQL wiki First Steps page
initdb is the CLI for initializing a new Postgres instance, and it allows the user to set all instance parameters.
The only required parameter for initdb is the directory to initialize the database cluster into, provided by the -D/--pgdata flag. For a Homebrew install, this should be /usr/local/var/postgres.
The other parameter we will use is the username of initial superuser for the database cluster. From the docs:
-U username--username=usernameselects the user name of the database superuser. This defaults to the name of the effective user running initdb. It is really not important what the superuser’s name is, but one might choose to keep the customary name postgres, even if the operating system user’s name is different.
Put it all together to initialize with our preferred superuser:
% initdb -D /usr/local/var/postgres -U postgres
...[initialization logs]
This replaces the initialization step that would normally be run (without the option to name the superuser) during post_install
See the Troubleshooting section for common issues that can arise at this step.
3. Start Postgres
You may start and stop Postgres with either the built-in pg_ctl command or the brew services process manager. The primary difference is that a Postgres process started with pg_ctl will die when you exit the terminal session, while brew services will keep Postgres running in the background. Keeping Postgres running is probably the desired behavior for most developers.
pg_ctl also requires the -D/--pgdata argument to know where the Postgres instance is located:
% pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres start
...[startup logs]
If you receive an error from pg_ctl, Postgres is likely already running.
brew services does not require specifying the directory:
% brew services start postgres
==> Successfully started `postgresql` (label: homebrew.mxcl.postgresql)
4. Login to the Postgres CLI
Psql is the Postgres interactive terminal, used to query interactively as well as manage the cluster with meta-commands.
By default, psql will attempt to log in with the currently-active username, so we have to provide the -U/--username flag to log in as postgres:
% psql -U postgres
psql (13.0)
Type "help" for help.
postgres=#
Now we can see that postgres is the only user on the instance:
postgres=# \du
List of roles
Role name | Attributes | Member of
-----------+------------------------------------------------------------+-----------
postgres | Superuser, Create role, Create DB, Replication, Bypass RLS | {}
As well as the owner of the existing databases:
postgres=# \l
List of databases
Name | Owner | Encoding | Collate | Ctype | Access privileges
-----------+----------+----------+-------------+-------------+-----------------------
postgres | postgres | UTF8 | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 |
template0 | postgres | UTF8 | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 | =c/postgres +
| | | | | postgres=CTc/postgres
template1 | postgres | UTF8 | en_US.UTF-8 | en_US.UTF-8 | =c/postgres +
| | | | | postgres=CTc/postgres
5. Create Your First Database
Postgres allows hyphenated database names but hyphenated names don’t work with the CLI’s autocomplete, so delimiting with underscores will make your life a bit easier.
postgres=# CREATE DATABASE test_0;
CREATE DATABASE
Connect & try the tab-completion available on the database names:
postgres=# \c f[press tab here to autocomplete database name]
postgres=# \c test_0
You are now connected to database "test_0" as user "postgres".
test_0=#
6. Exit & Stop Postgres
From the psql command line, \quit, \q, and Ctrl-D will all work to exit the interactive session.
If you want to stop the Postgres instance altogether, use brew services - pg_ctl has a stop command but it doesn’t always stop all the background processes that Postgres runs.
% brew services stop postgres
Stopping `postgresql`... (might take a while)
==> Successfully stopped `postgresql` (label: homebrew.mxcl.postgresql)
Troubleshooting
When running initdb, you may receive an error like this:
initdb: error: directory "/usr/local/var/postgres" exists but is not empty
If you want to create a new database system, either remove or empty
the directory "/usr/local/var/postgres" or run initdb
with an argument other than "/usr/local/var/postgres".
If this happens, it’s likely too late - Homebrew has initialized the instance with your MacOS username as the owner of everything. Confirm by listing the databases to see their owners:
% psql -d postgres -c "\l"
List of databases
Name | Owner | Encoding | Collate | Ctype | Access privileges
-----------+--------+----------+---------+-------+-------------------
postgres | franco | UTF8 | C | C |
template0 | franco | UTF8 | C | C | =c/franco +
| | | | | franco=CTc/franco
template1 | franco | UTF8 | C | C | =c/franco +
| | | | | franco=CTc/franco
Assuming this is truly a fresh Postgres install and we don’t have any old data in /usr/local/var/postgres that we want to keep, this can be “fixed” by deleting the whole instance.
THIS WILL DELETE ALL OF YOUR POSTGRES DATA
% rm -rf /usr/local/var/postgres
Now you can jump back to Step 2.