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I'm running a rails app in development with postgresql 9.3. When I tried to start passenger server today, I got:

PG::ConnectionBad - could not connect to server: Connection refused
    Is the server running on host "localhost" (217.74.65.145) and accepting
    TCP/IP connections on port 5432?

No big deal I thought, that happened before. Restarting postgres always solved the problem. So I ran sudo service postgresql restart and got:

 * Restarting PostgreSQL 9.3 database server
 * The PostgreSQL server failed to start. Please check the log output:
2014-06-11 10:32:41 CEST LOG:  could not bind IPv4 socket: Cannot assign requested address
2014-06-11 10:32:41 CEST HINT:  Is another postmaster already running on port 5432? If not, wait a few seconds and retry.
2014-06-11 10:32:41 CEST WARNING:  could not create listen socket for "localhost"
2014-06-11 10:32:41 CEST FATAL:  could not create any TCP/IP sockets
...fail!

My postgresql.conf points to the defaults: localhost and port 5432. I tried changing the port but the error message is the same (except the port change).

Both ps aux | grep postgresql and ps aux | grep postmaster return nothing.

EDIT:

In postgresql.conf I changed listen_addresses to 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost and it did the trick, server restarted. I also had to edit my applications' db config and point to 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost. However, the question is now, why is localhost considered to be 217.74.65.145 and not 127.0.0.1?

That's my /etc/hosts:

127.0.0.1   local
127.0.1.1   jacek-X501A1
127.0.0.1   something.name.non.example.com
127.0.0.1   company.something.name.non.example.com
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3
  • 2
    any output from sudo netstat -anlp | grep 5432?
    – Flup
    Jun 11, 2014 at 8:45
  • 1
    If you're going to obfuscate your data, please do so responsibly and use example.com as the domain name.
    – Jenny D
    Jun 11, 2014 at 9:06
  • I was getting similar error when that port was blocked by a docker container.
    – Krishna
    Mar 6, 2022 at 16:23

3 Answers 3

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14

Your /etc/hosts is broken. The first line should read 

127.0.0.1   localhost something.name.non.example.com company.something.name.non.example.com
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5
  • Note for future readers that even if you do have a localhost entry in /etc/hosts, various other factors can cause a different DNS response when a DNS lookup of localhost is actually run. See stackoverflow.com/a/47824848/5419599.
    – Wildcard
    Dec 15, 2017 at 2:11
  • @Wildcard I do not know which OS that answer would be applicable to (if any). It certainly doesn't make much sense on Linux.
    – kasperd
    Jan 4, 2019 at 16:19
  • 1
    @kasperd I suppose if you've got the order dns files instead of files dns in nsswitch.conf, and have a name server that resolves localhost, you could get in trouble. But that does sound highly unlikely to me...
    – Jenny D
    Jan 5, 2019 at 12:11
  • @JennyD The answer linked above suggests using nslookup to verify. But the nslookup command on Linux doesn't use nsswitch.conf and /etc/hosts in the first place. And as for putting dns files in the configuration, that sounds like asking for trouble to me.
    – kasperd
    Jan 5, 2019 at 12:58
  • 1
    @kasperd Agreed - it would be fairly high on the "it's-your-own-damned-fault" scale...
    – Jenny D
    Jan 7, 2019 at 7:27
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I understand that this question is answered, but for those who still have the error, the reason could be is that some other process has already started it. For example Homebrew on system boot.

If that's the case try to stop it:
brew services stop postgres

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0

For me it was the listening address of Postgres: it was configured to listen on its own IP (not 'localhost') on the network it was probably connected to when installed.

Anyway, open postgresql.conf and make sure listen_addresses = 'localhost' (or something else meaningful to you).

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