I have recently installed PostGIS on my Mac (El Capitan 10.11.4, Postgres is version 9.5.1) using Homebrew, and I am following these instructions - http://morphocode.com/how-to-install-postgis-on-mac-os-x/
When I try to start Postgres using
pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres start
I get the following error:
$ FATAL: lock file "postmaster.pid" already exists
HINT: Is another postmaster (PID 280) running in data directory "/usr/local/var/postgres"?
So I spent a few hours researching how to address this, but to no avail.
Notably, I tried to kill the PID as recommended in an answer on Superuser - https://superuser.com/questions/553045/fatal-lock-file-postmaster-pid-already-exists- (in the case above, I ran kill 208
), but as soon as I tried to start Postgres again, I got the same error, albeit with a different PID number. I saw a few people recommended deleting the postmaster.pid file, but I feel like maybe I should save that as a last resort...
Admittedly part of the reason I'm not sure how to fix this is that I'm not really clear on what the postmaster even is - I'm just starting to learn about all of this.
Hopping into a Postgres database via the psql db_name
command works just fine, for what it's worth.