Comments on: Installing psycopg2 on OS X

By: QWorks

QWorks — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 00:28:20 +0000

Thank you a million times over. I have been trying to get psycopg2 on OS X Lion for like 4 hours now…This was the single thing that finally got rid of my headache!!
Now on to developing

By: Vlad

Vlad — Fri, 11 Feb 2011 19:11:59 +0000

This doesnt work in Snow Leopard. Do you have any updates on how to make it run in 10.6?

I still get the following:

Python 2.6.6 (r266:84374, Aug 31 2010, 11:00:51)
[GCC 4.0.1 (Apple Inc. build 5493)] on darwin
Type “help”, “copyright”, “credits” or “license” for more information.
>>> import psycopg2
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 1, in
File “/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/psycopg2/__init__.py”, line 69, in
from _psycopg import BINARY, NUMBER, STRING, DATETIME, ROWID
ImportError: dlopen(/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/psycopg2/_psycopg.so, 2): Symbol not found: _PQbackendPID
Referenced from: /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.6/lib/python2.6/site-packages/psycopg2/_psycopg.so
Expected in: dynamic lookup

Will appreciate any feedback!

By: Peter

Peter — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:22:54 +0000

Installing psycopg2 on Mac OS X
Friday, 30. October 2009 Filed in: Apple
psycopg2 is an adapter to PostgreSQL for Python. Install this software on GNU/Linux is easy because many distros offer binary packages ready to install it. On Mac OS X is different so we explain how to do that.

Of course, you need to install PostgreSQL and Python before to install this adapter. When you are ready you must follow this steps:

$ wget http://initd.org/pub/software/psycopg/psycopg2-2.0.12.tar.gz
$ tar -zxvf psycopg2-2.0.12.tar.gz
$ cd psycopg-2.0.12
$ export PATH=$PATH:/Library/PostgreSQL/8.4/bin/
$ python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install

Then you can use this adapter in your Python scripts:

>> import psycopg2

By: carriere

carriere — Mon, 10 May 2010 15:29:45 +0000

I’ve got the same error
psycopg/psycopgmodule.c:822: error: ‘PyType_GenericAlloc’ undeclared (first use in this function)
error: command ‘gcc’ failed with exit status 1

did you find a solution ?

By: Johann Spies

Johann Spies — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 15:44:16 +0000

My installation on Snow Leopard ends with

sudo python setup.py install
running install
running build
running build_py
running build_ext
building ‘psycopg2._psycopg’ extension
gcc -arch ppc -arch i386 -isysroot /Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.4u.sdk -fno-strict-aliasing -Wno-long-double -no-cpp-precomp -mno-fused-madd -fno-common -dynamic -DNDEBUG -g -O3 -DPSYCOPG_DEFAULT_PYDATETIME=1 -DPSYCOPG_VERSION=”2.0.14 (dt dec ext pq3)” -DPG_VERSION_HEX=0×080403 -DPSYCOPG_EXTENSIONS=1 -DPSYCOPG_NEW_BOOLEAN=1 -DHAVE_PQFREEMEM=1 -DHAVE_PQPROTOCOL3=1 -I/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/include/python2.5 -I. -I/Library/PostgreSQL/8.4/include -I/Library/PostgreSQL/8.4/include/postgresql/server -c psycopg/psycopgmodule.c -o build/temp.macosx-10.3-i386-2.5/psycopg/psycopgmodule.o
cc1: error: unrecognized command line option “-Wno-long-double”
cc1: error: unrecognized command line option “-Wno-long-double”
lipo: can’t figure out the architecture type of: /var/tmp//ccmP38pg.out
error: command ‘gcc’ failed with exit status 1

How do I fix it?

By: Pat

Pat — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:10:28 +0000

I pasted the wrong link in above. The correct one is here.

By: Pat

Pat — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:08:45 +0000

None of the steps above worked for me. [Snow Leopard 10.6.2; PostgreSQL 8.4, pyscopg2-2.0.13]

A post on the Django Users list at osdir.com had the suggestion to update easy_install:

sudo easy_install -U setuptools

This followed by adding the PostgreSQL bin to my path allowed easy_install to succeed.

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:39:04 +0000

Thanks!! Your original one works, but not the shorter one for me…

By: David Simmer

David Simmer — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:04:28 +0000

I should clarify, I was using Fink to install pyscopg2 into python2.4 on Snow Leopard, where fink doesn’t have pyscopg2 available for python2.4. If i were using python 2.5 or 2.6, a simple “fink install psycopg2″ would have been sufficient.

By: David Simmer

David Simmer — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 16:03:00 +0000

Hugely helpful, thank you. In my case I’m using Fink, so my command was:

PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/pgsql/bin/ sudo easy_install psycopg2