Configuring Postgres in Ubuntu 9.1 Rails dev-box for Cucumber testing...

Question

I'm trying to install Postgres 8.4 for a Rails dev-box and I'm having a couple problems.

I installed postgres and pg-admin3 through apt-get.

Using the lastest Rails 2.3.5 and lastest Ruby 1.9.1

Now the configuration is bothering me. I found some documentation regarding setting up the user for the postgres user(which is the default admin user for postgres I guess), which I did.

sudo -u postgres psql postgres 
\password postgres

Prior to that I was getting an error...

FATAL:  Ident authentication failed for user

After handling that, I managed to create a database in pg-admin3.

Updated the auto-generated database.yml to look like this.

development:
  adapter: postgresql
  encoding: unicode
  database: rails-box_development
  pool: 5
  username: postgres
  password: ********
  host: localhost
  port: 5432

After this rake db:create works. If I remove the host and port it doesn't work.

My Question is.. What is the default configuration for those developers that use Rails and Postgres for development? You use that ident stuff or what? What are your steps if you are setting up a new box?

Answer 1

You need to adjust /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/pg_hba.conf (or 8.3 if you are running that). Look here:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/auth-pg-hba-conf.html