How to enable TCP/IP for Postgres on OS X 10.7 Server?

Question

The default configuration in /var/pgsql/postgresql.conf says that listen_addresses defaults to localhost, but it doesn't let me connect over port 5432. Connecting (as root, using sudo) over a Unix domain socket works fine, but I need to enable network connections.

I tried uncommenting the listen_addresses = 'localhost' line (to make it explicit), and restarting the Postgres process (with sudo serveradmin stop postgres, sudo serveradmin start postgres), but that didn't help.

Answer 1

The Postgres process started by "serveradmin" has command-line arguments added by /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postgresql.postgres.plist. The default includes -c listen_addresses=, which turns off TCP/IP.

Changing it to listen_addresses=localhost, and restarting Postgres, solved the problem. (I suppose I could probably also remove the -c argument entirely.)

(One comment I found somewhere suggested that in 10.8 Server, the file you need to edit is /Library/Server/PostgreSQL/Config/org.postgresql.postgres.plist, but I haven't upgraded to 10.8 yet so I can't confirm this.)