How to Restart PostgreSQL While Developing a Rails App
While developing a Rails apps using PostgreSQL (unlike MySQL) I often run out of db connections and see errors like
and when I do, my Rails app stops working. Restarting Postgres fixing the problem, but it was harder to restart postgres that I expected. Here’s how I do it.
To restart PostgreSQL I added a function to my ~/.bash_profile file:
After saving and restarting Terminal, running ‘pgr’ will find all the postgres process and kill them. Once launchd notices postgres is down it restarts it because I setup launchd to keep postgres running no matter what. If you don’t have postgres setup to stay running, you would need to start postgres whatever way matches your setup. I tried a number of different solutions before I arrived at this one:
- running ‘pg_ctl -D restart’ would cause postgres to try and restart, but it would timeout unsuccessful
- logging out then logging back in again works (since I’m running postgres as a ‘personal’ launch agent, it starts and stops with my login and logout) but that’s terribly disruptive to my work
- killall would kill some, but not all of the errant postgres processes
I’m running OSX Lion, PostgreSQL 9.1.2, Rails 3.1.3, Ruby 1.9.2-p290. I Googled the hive-mind for a better answer, after all, when developing a rails app using MySQL I had no such problem. It seems others have run into this, but I didn’t find a better solution. I have a nagging feeling there’s some setting I could add to my database.yml file to get PostgreSQL to behave well in my development environment and obviate the need for my PostgreSQL restarting shenanigans, but I’ve not yet discovered it.