Setting Up Postgres on macOS for Development

This is a simple guide to help you set up a postgres database service on your mac. This will allow to develop. This guide assumes you have homebrew installed. If you don’t, do that first here.

Install Postgres

Simple if you have homebrew.

$ brew install postgresql

Once the install is complete it will ask you a couple question to set it up. Username, password… etc.

After the initialization is complete, you may have noticed mention of brew services for running postgres as a background service. This will be convenient to automatically start postgres at system startup, and easily start and stop the process.

$ brew tap homebrew/services

Now we can start the postgres service with the following command,

$ brew services start postgresql
# ==> Successfully started `postgresql` (label: homebrew.mxcl.postgresql)

It can be stopped,

$ brew services stop postgresql
# Stopping `postgresql`... (might take a while)
# ==> Successfully stopped `postgresql` (label: homebrew.mxcl.postgresql)

or it can be restarted,

$ brew services restart postgresql
# Stopping `postgresql`... (might take a while)
# ==> Successfully stopped `postgresql` (label: homebrew.mxcl.postgresql)
# ==> Successfully started `postgresql` (label: homebrew.mxcl.postgresql)

Donezo! Now you can use postgres in your application development locally. In the setup use your user’s username as the user for the postgres db.