PostgreSQL Mountain Lion socket issue
macos, osx-mountain-lion, postgresql
Solution
According to the error message, the `psql` command that appears first in the `$PATH` has `/tmp` as the hard-coded default unix socket directory.
Since the actual directory is in fact `/var/pgsql_socket`, you should tell it explicitly rather than relying on the default:
$ psql -h /var/pgsql_socket [other options]
The same applies to other client-side commands like `createdb`, `dropdb`, `createuser`...
If you don't want to specify `-h` each time, it can be put into the `PGHOST` environment variable.
Some people also solve this by using TCP connections to `localhost` rather than using the Unix socket directory.
The root cause of this issue would be that after installing PostgreSQL on Mac OS X, the system ends up having two different instances of the postgres client set (the `libpq` library, `psql` and other associated utilities), one that is bundled with MacOS and the other that comes with the PostgreSQL installer.
Therefore yet another method is to change your `$PATH` so that the `psql` installed with PostgreSQL gets choosen before the one installed with the system (presumably `/usr/bin/psql`).
Problem
I've been trying to set up PostgreSQL on my system (OSX 10.8, clean install), but I'm running into trouble with using `psql`, `createdb`, etc. I've tried various solutions and none seem to work. The install was successful, and I proceeded to fix the known sockets issue using the following: ``` mkdir /var/pgsql_socket sudo chown $USER /var/pgsql_socket ``` Then I edited `postgresql.conf`, set `unix_socket_directory` to ``` unix_socket_directory = '/var/pgsql_socket' ``` and restarted Pg. That should apparently have fixed the socket issue, but I'm still getting: ``` psql: could not connect to server: No such file or directory Is the server running locally and accepting connections on Unix domain socket "/tmp/.s.PGSQL.5432"? ``` Also, I've checked the status of the server, and it appears to be running, but I still get 'no such file or directory' Any ideas?