Elite Frontier

The default clean installation of Snow Leopard uses the en_US.us-ascii locale. Unfortunately, when installing postgresql 8.3 using macports, the installer will complain when initializing the database, for example:

sudo su postgres -c '/opt/local/lib/postgresql83/bin/initdb 
-D /opt/local/var/db/postgresql83/defaultdb'

You will get the following error

The database cluster will be initialized with locale en_US.us-ascii.
could not determine encoding for locale "en_US.us-ascii": codeset is "us-ascii" 
initdb: could not find suitable encoding for locale en_US.us-ascii
Rerun initdb with the -E option.
Try "initdb --help" for more information.

The solution is to change the locale. First we list the locales available:

Outrun:db rdegraci$ locale -a | grep en_US
en_US
en_US.ISO8859-1
en_US.ISO8859-15
en_US.US-ASCII
en_US.UTF-8

Now we set the locale to en_US.UTF-8

Outrun:~ rdegraci$ export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Outrun:~ rdegraci$ sudo su postgres -c '/opt/local/lib/postgresql83/bin/initdb 
-D /opt/local/var/db/postgresql83/defaultdb'

The files belonging to this database system will be owned by user "postgres".
This user must also own the server process.

The database cluster will be initialized with locale en_US.UTF-8.
The default database encoding has accordingly been set to UTF8.
The default text search configuration will be set to "english".

fixing permissions on existing directory /opt/local/var/db/postgresql83/defaultdb ... ok
creating subdirectories ... ok
selecting default max_connections ... 20
selecting default shared_buffers/max_fsm_pages ... 1600kB/20000
creating configuration files ... ok
creating template1 database in /opt/local/var/db/postgresql83/defaultdb/base/1 ... ok
initializing pg_authid ... ok
initializing dependencies ... ok
creating system views ... ok
loading system objects' descriptions ... ok
creating conversions ... ok
creating dictionaries ... ok
setting privileges on built-in objects ... ok
creating information schema ... ok
vacuuming database template1 ... ok
copying template1 to template0 ... ok
copying template1 to postgres ... ok