I’ve downloaded PosgreSQL from PostgreSQL for Mac and installed it, immediately after the server runs. From the diskimage I got the folders where the terminal binaries are installed (the GUI tools which come with the package don’t work for me) and it all worked. That saves a lot of compilation time!

Using Ruby on Rails with PostgreSQL is fairly simple, just install the ruby-postgres gem (gem install ruby-postgres) and have your database.yml represent something like:

development:
  adapter: postgresql
  database: my_development
  username: tdegrunt
  password:
  encoding: utf8