Stop postgreSQL service on Mac via terminal [closed]

first, check if your OS is running brew (shorted version of homebrew (page - https://brew.sh/ to find more information)]. To verify it, please, run in your terminal:

brew version:

bash-3.2$> brew -v
Homebrew X.X.XX

If it matches for you, consider using next brew subcommand:

Brew services

bash-3.2$ brew services

Description (extraction from man brew help information)

brew services [subcommand]
       Manage background services with macOS’ launchctl(1) daemon manager or
       Linux’s systemctl(1) service manager.

Example of use:

bash-3.2$ brew services list
Name                  Status  User    File
[email protected] none
postgresql@XX         started [LOCAL_USER] 
redis                 none

Note: Verify your PostgreSQL version with format: @XX and current service status: [none|started|...].

Identify in this command if you have a service running that matches, in this case, to Postgres, and it will look as above example.

Stop service

Please, this command will attempt to stop your service. Use it wisely, make sure you navigated first brew services stop documentation, and properly scoped the impact of this command in your current environment.

Description (extraction from man brew help information)

[sudo] brew services stop (formula|--all):
    Stop the service formula immediately and unregister it from launching at
login (or boot).

Example of use:

Stop a service

brew services stop postgresql@15

Huge mention to @Ciara Spencer (https://stackoverflow.com/users/14436643/ciara-spencer).

Happy coding!

Restart it with

sudo -u postgres pg_ctl -D /Library/PostgreSQL/11/data stop

Tried sudo and su but no such luck. Just found this gui

https://github.com/MaccaTech/postgresql-mac-preferences

If anyone can help with the terminal commands that would be very much appreciated, but till then the gui will get the job done.

Had the same issue, I had installed postgres locally and wanted to wrap in a docker container instead.

I solved it pretty radically by 1) uninstalling postgres 2) kill the leftover process on postgres port. If you don't un-install the process restarts and grabs the port again - look at your Brewfile form brew bundle dump to check for a restart_service: true flag.

I reasoned that, as I am using containers, I should not need the local one anyway, but !! attention this will remove postgres from your system.

brew uninstall postgres
...
lsof -i :5432 # this to find the PID for the process
kill - 9 <the PID you found at previous command> 

Note: if you still want to used psql you can brew install libpq, and add psql to your PATH (the command output shows you what to add to your .zshrc, or similar)

I just installed Postgres 15 on OS X Ventura and also could not figure out how to stop it. The following worked:

sudo -u postgres /Library/PostgreSQL/15/bin/pg_ctl -D /Library/PostgreSQL/15/data stop

you can stop the server using this command

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

Adding onto the solutions already stated :

if you decide to use the pg_ctl command, ensure that you are executing the command as a user with the permissions to access the databases/database server.

this means :

• the current logged in user on your terminal should have those permissions

or

• first run :

$ sudo su <name_of_database_user>

pg_ctl -D /Library/PostgreSQL/<version_here>/data/ stop

the same goes for the start command.

credit : https://gist.github.com/kingbin/9435292 (essentially hosted a file with the commands on github, saved me some time :^) )

Another possible scenario is when you installed PostgreSQL via UI, the command to find the process is:

netstat -vanp tcp | grep 5432

Then you kill the PID

kill -9 PID_FROM_netstat

I had a stray docker container running Postgres that I had forgotten about.