I've been playing with Django & MySQL for a while but for my next project I wanted to integrate it with a PostgreSQL database. Everything went well until I wanted to install Psycopg as my python adapter to PostgreSQL.

After a bit of blundering about here's what it eventually took:

  • Download and install PostgreSQL one-click installer from http://www.postgresql.org/download/macosx. Remember to read the README file before actually running the installer.
  • Download the psycopg2 source from http://initd.org/pub/software/psycopg/.
  • Edit the setup.cfg file to provide a path to the pg_config executable. On my Mac it sits in /Library/PostgreSQL/8.4/bin/pg_config and is not by default on the PATH so if you don't put it on the PATH or in this configuration file the next step will fail in a spectacular manner.
  • Run 'sudo easy_install .' in the top level psycopg2 source directory.
  • Specify postgresql_psycopg2 when you configure Django's database layer for your project.