Using PostgreSQL on MacOSX Snow Leopard 64-bit Machines

Posted On: May 13, 2011 at 11:52 a.m. by Neum

I recently started a new job and they were awesome enough to provide me with the latest Macbook Pro. Thank you!!! Anyway, everything worked great but I could not get Postgresql connected using psycopg2. It would always give me a _PQbackendPID error. I searched around and tried seemingly everything, from downgrading Python to run in 32bit mode to installing everything new with Homebrew. Nothing worked.

Finally I found this awesome post by Tim Child’s where he explains how to get everything hooked up and working.

In a nutshell, if you just got a new 64bit Mac and want to work with Postgres locally you should download the latest python as Tim explains and install it before following his instructions for installing psycopg2 and PostgreSQL from EnterpriseDB before adding virtualenv or other packages.

On a side note, if you install PIL locally you’ll want to add .jpg support to PIL like so…