Postgresql – How to uninstall postgresql on the Mac (running Snow Leopard)

If all of your tables are in a single schema, this approach could work (below code assumes that the name of your schema is public)

DROP SCHEMA public CASCADE;
CREATE SCHEMA public;

If you are using PostgreSQL 9.3 or greater, you may also need to restore the default grants.

GRANT ALL ON SCHEMA public TO postgres;
GRANT ALL ON SCHEMA public TO public;

The Homebrew package manager includes launchctl plists to start automatically. For more information, run brew info postgres.

Start manually

pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres start

Stop manually

pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres stop

Start automatically

"To have launchd start postgresql now and restart at login:"

brew services start postgresql

What is the result of pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres -l /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log start?

What is the result of pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres status?

Are there any error messages in the server.log?

Make sure tcp localhost connections are enabled in pg_hba.conf:

# IPv4 local connections:
host    all    all    127.0.0.1/32    trust

Check the listen_addresses and port in postgresql.conf:

egrep 'listen|port' /usr/local/var/postgres/postgresql.conf

#listen_addresses = 'localhost'        # What IP address(es) to listen on;
#port = 5432                # (change requires restart)

Cleaning up

PostgreSQL was most likely installed via Homebrew, Fink, MacPorts or the EnterpriseDB installer.

Check the output of the following commands to determine which package manager it was installed with:

brew && brew list|grep postgres
fink && fink list|grep postgres
port && port installed|grep postgres