So, I tend to do a lot of lower-level stuff on OS-X such as compiling my own PostgreSQL server for development and testing purposes.  One of the things that tends to interrupt the process of actually trying to run postgres is that it cannot change to the postgres user and it cannot run it as root.

In order to accomplish this you could make a user with your System Preferences which I have done in the past, the problem is then every time you log into your computer you’ll see this postgres user for no reason. Ugh, I hate that.  So to work around this you just have to run the following commands in your OS-X terminal to add a group and user for postgres, with the user “home” being the default compilation target directory for PostgreSQL (/usr/local/pgsql)

This is confirmed to work on every version of Leopard and Snow Leopard.

Cheers and enjoy!

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