matt roumaya

I had some trouble setting up PostgreSQL via Homebrew and am documenting the steps for future reference (and maybe it’ll help someone)!

Install via Homebrew 🏠🍺:

I’m installing v16.

# check and update homebrew
brew doctor
brew update

# install postgresql@16
brew install postgresql@16

Start Services

Start postgresql now that everything is installed:

brew services start postgresql@16

This is where I encountered my issue, which was that the PATH was not set, so all PostgreSQL terminal commands were not recognized (despite looking like all is well after starting brew services).

Find Path

To resolve this, I needed to find the /bin where postgres is installed:

 sudo find / -name pg_config

This returned a few matches, but the one I needed was: /System/Volumes/Data/opt/homebrew/Cellar/postgresql@16/16.2_1/bin/pg_config

To set a persistent path, I ran:

open ~/.zshrc

… and pasted:

export PATH=$PATH:/System/Volumes/Data/opt/homebrew/Cellar/postgresql@16/16.2_1/bin/

Now it should work! Check it with:

psql --version

Learning More

I have phillymetal on Supabase, but have been thinking of making a similar resource for jazz music in the area. I’d like to learn how to develop a database outside of a hosted platform and deploy it with Docker, so that’s my tentative plan.