Following on from my last post for getting PostgreSQL up and running nicely on Mac OS X, my next task was getting it playing nicely with ruby on rails – I’m off on a rails course next week so I’m getting stuff ready. :)

It appears that there is currently two/three gem packages for using postgresql with ruby: postgres, ruby-pg, and pg – and from what I can make out, they’re all maintained by the same team now, (postgres was the original package, but it got abandoned – ruby-pg and pg are the replacements). As such, i’ll go with the newer ruby-pg gem…

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install \
ruby-pg -- \
--with-pgsql-lib=/opt/local/lib/postgresql83 \
--with-pgsql-include=/opt/local/include/postgresql83

Then finally, when writing the database.yml entry for connecting to postgresql, we have to define our adapter as follows:

development:
  adapter: postgresql
  database: test_dev
  encoding: unicode
  host: localhost
  user: XXXXX
  password: XXXXX
  timeout: 5000