Rails and Postgres aren't getting along after switching from Macports to Homebrew; PGError: ERROR: unrecognized time zone name: “UTC”

Question

I moved everything that I had in /opt/local (where Macports' things lived) into ~/.macports. That included my old postgres database cluster.

Then I installed postgres using Homebrew and ran the setup that it told me to (creating a new database cluster in /usr/local).

In my project, I ran rake db:drop:all and rake db:create. These did their work cheerfully.

But when I tried to rake db:migrate, postgres and rails fight and tell me

rake aborted!
PGError: ERROR:  unrecognized time zone name: "UTC"
: SET time zone 'UTC'

I don't know what they're talking about, though. I found this article about a config.time_zone bug slightly illuminating, but not enough to find my way.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm not completely sure how I fixed it, but uninstalling Postgres and reinstalling it (and following the setup instructions it gives very carefully) got it working.

Answer 2

I was getting this error and simply need to start postgres manually:

  pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres -l /usr/local/var/postgres/server.log start

You can also stop it:

pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres stop -s -m fast

Answer 3

After much head banging, I solved this problem by running:

env ARCHFLAGS="-arch x86_64" gem install pg