Upgrading PostgreSQL with Homebrew

16 Jan 2015

Updating Postgres isn’t a simple brew upgrade postgresql if you want to keep your data. Here are the steps I took to go from 9.3 to 9.4 based on http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/upgrading.html.

First backup your data with pg_dumpall:

$ mkdir ~/backups && pg_dumpall -h 127.0.0.1 > ~/backups/postgres.sql

Shut down 9.3:

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

Move the old data files out of the way (you can delete them later when everything is back up and working):

$ mv /usr/local/var/postgres /usr/local/var/postgres.old

Uninstall 9.3:

$ brew uninstall postgresql

Now install 9.4 and verify that it worked:

$ brew update
$ brew upgrade postgresql
$ psql --version
psql (PostgreSQL) 9.4.0

Start 9.4:

$ pg_ctl -D /usr/local/var/postgres start

Restore your databases:

$ psql -d postgres < ~/backups/postgres.sql