Where should I `initdb` on a first postgres install?

Question

Setting up a development environment on a new machine, brew installed postgres. Now I need to initdb for the first time, which directory should i specify for this command?

Answer 1

Assuming you're on OS X, given "brew", then:

• If you intend to run the postgres server under your own user account, put it somewhere like /Users/MyUserName/Library/postgres_data.

• If you intend to run it from launchd as a system service, as a dedicated postgres user, put it somewhere in /Library/.

However, Homebrew takes this out of your hands a bit with brew services:

brew tap homebrew/services

which I recommend using. I don't have a Mac and the docs appear to be nonexistent for this, but it looks like it's as simple as:

brew services start postgres

If not, the interactive help will probably tell you what you need to do.

Answer 2

It seems brew failed to create a database when installing postgres, the solution for me, as found here, was to run createdb then all was fine.