I recently had issues connecting to a PostgreSQL (Postgres) database on my local server, and had to perform quite a few steps to get it working properly. The following commands should be run in the terminal. Since I had a version that was installed on my machine a couple of years ago, I had to remove my previous version by performing the first step below.

Remove previous versions of Postgres

brew uninstall --force postgresql and rm -rf /usr/local/var/postgres

Install Postgres with Homebrew

brew install postgresql -v

Since it is your first time running Postgres after installation, you will need to run the following to initialize the Postgres database

initdb /usr/local/var/postgres

It may look like you received an error, but don’t worry, this is not the last step.

initdb: 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".

Remove old database files

rm -r /usr/local/var/postgres

Run the initdb command again

initdb /usr/local/var/postgres

You should now receive a message of success!

Start the Postgres database server

postgres -D /usr/local/var/postgres

###Username and password Note that your username for your local Postgres database is shown in the following, which is part of the success message on installation.

The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "this_is_your_username".
This user must also own the server process.

Your password by default is “postgres”