Setting Up Postgres on Mac OSX with Homebrew

I ran into some challenges installing postgres via homebrew. I attempted to follow these instruction, as is advised by the postgres website but ran into further problems. The following steps outline how I was able to finally work around the problems. Note that I'm using Mac OSX 10.6.8.

Uninstall old versions of postgres:

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brew rm postgresql --force

Update homebrew:

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brew update

Install postgres:

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brew install postgresql

Make a postgres directory:

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sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/var/postgres

Tweak its permissions (change "YOURUSERNAME" to your username:

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sudo chown YOURUSERNAME:admin /usr/local/var/postgres/

initdb:

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initdb /usr/local/var/postgres/data

Add postgres to LaunchAgents directory:

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cp /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.2.4/homebrew.mxcl.postgresql.plist ~/Library/LaunchAgents

Load it:

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launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.postgres.plist

Start the server:

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pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres/data -l /usr/local/var/postgres/data/server.log start

Note: If you receive a 'FATAL: role "postgres" does not exist' message when doing something like rake db:create, you may be missing the default postres user, postgres. This can be fixed with the following command:

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createuser -s -U $USER