'''First written: April 27, 2014 at 7:55pm''' OSX since Lion comes with postgres but it seems a little hard to figure out exactly how to get it running so I thought I'd read a short entry so I could remember how I did it. (1) Check if postgres is running: sudo serveradmin fullstatus postgres (2) If it is not running you can get it running with the command: sudo serveradmin start postgres (3) Make sure postgres is listening to localhost: cd /Library/Server/PostgreSQL/Config/ sudo nano org.postgresql.postgres.plist change listen_addresses= to listen_addresses=127.0.0.1 save and then type: sudo serveradmin stop postgres sudo serveradmin start postgres (4) Use template1 to create database accounts sudo -u _postgres psql template1 CREATE USER myusername WITH PASSWORD 'mypassword'; CREATE DATABASE mydatabase; GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON mydatabase TO myusername; \q (5) You should now be able to connect to the database from a terminal window using: psql -d mydatabase -u myusername (6) Another thing you may need to do is cd /Library/Server/PostgreSQL/Data you might want to change the default trust settings for connections specified in pg_hba.conf to some other kind of authentication. For example, host all myusername 127.0.0.1/32 password