Rails and PostgreSQL: Role postgres does not exist

Question

I have installed PostgreSQL on my Mac OS Lion, and am working on a rails app. I use RVM to keep everything separate from my other Rails apps.

For some reason when I

Answer 1

I was on OSX 10.8, and everything I tried would give me the FATAL: role "USER" does not exist. Like many people said here, run createuser -s USER, but that gave me the same error. This finally worked for me:

$ sudo su
# su postgres
# createuser -s --username=postgres MYUSERNAME

The createuser -s --username=postgres creates a superuser (-s flag) by connecting as postgres (--username=postgres flag).

I see that your question has been answered, but I want to add this answer in for people using OSX trying to install PostgreSQL 9.2.4.