Restart PostgreSQL On Macintosh OSX From The Command Line

I don’t currently have a Mac but do get to work on them from time to time. A friend of mine recently had an issue with PostgreSQL on his Macbook Pro running OSX. In the process of helping him I needed to restart Postgres from a terminal window but wasn’t sure of where Postgres was installed.

PostgreSQL Default Install Location on OSX:

The default install location for Postgres on OSX is /Library/PostgreSQL. In this case the installed version was PostgreSQL 8.3 so the default directory is /Library/PostgreSQL/8.3. The directory structure is the same as a PostgreSQL installation on other versions of Linux.

Restart PostgreSQL On OSX:

pg_ctl -D /Library/PostgreSQL/8.3/data restart

Issue the above command as the postgres user to signal the application to restart. If you have made a configuration change and just need the PostgreSQL database to load the new configuration changes then issue the below command as the postgres user.

Reload PostgreSQL on OSX:

pg_ctl -D /Library/PostgreSQL/8.3/data reload

To find out more information on the pg_ctl command you can type “man pg_ctl” form a terminal window on your Mac.

See larger image Mac OS X for Unix Geeks (Leopard) (Paperback) By (author) Ernest E. Rothman, Brian Jepson, Rich Rosen List Price: $34.99 USD New From: $14.89 In Stock Used from: $0.95 In Stock

See larger image PostgreSQL 8.4 Official Documentation - Volume III. Server Programming (Paperback) By (author) The PostgreSQL Global Development Group List Price: $30.99 USD New From: $25.45 In Stock Used from: $8.96 In Stock

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