Installing PostgreSQL on OSX for Rails development

Question

I\'ve spent several hours over the past few days trying to get PostgreSQL to play nice with RoR on my Mac.

I\'ve followed several tutorials using several different metho

Answer 1

On a 64-bit Mac (Snow Leopard with Core 2 Duo or newer) I had to compile PostgreSQL from source, as rails kept complaining that:

*** Your PostgreSQL installation doesn't seem to have an architecture in common
with the running ruby interpreter (["ppc", "i386", "x86_64"] vs. [])

The architecture mismatch was probably bc I'd compiled rails from source, which defaulted to 64-bit. The binary installer on postgresql.org seemed only a 32-bit version. Setting ARCHFLAGS didn't fix this for me.

Anyhow, if you download the [source][1] from postgresql.org and follow the instructions in the INSTALL file, it's fairly straightforward. You don't have to create a new user if you use your own account. I did have to create the sysctl.conf file to expand shared memory - just google 'postgresql os x sysctl.conf'