Thanks John and Richard for your help.
I've updated (I thought I needed an older version for some dependency, but I was wrong) to 9.0
In case anyone else happens to find this and has similar questions, here's a little synopsis of what it took for me to finish setting up postgresql:
delete any existing postgres users.
make a new user from terminal, outlined
here. (I added a password and admin group status instead of postgres group status)
Make folders for the new postgres user, just using mkdir in terminal. "/usr/local/pgsql" and "/usr/local/pgsql/data"
I needed to copy brand new .bash_profile and .bashrc files into the /usr/local/pgsql directory
then I had to use "su postgres" to login as the postgres account. (not sudo su postgres)
Then I used source .bash_profile to load the new bash configuration. This is necessary to ensure that postgres commands are available in the PATH environment variable (which I had already set in a different .bash_profile file)
from there I used the
initdb command to create a database cluster in
/usr/local/pgsql/dataThen I used the
chown command discussed on
this page to give ownership to the postgres user
That finally created the
pg_hba.conf file that Richard mentioned. I did not need to edit this file because the default authorization value is "
trust", meaning that it can be accessed without a password.
Once the server was running I was able to create new superusers (using createuser, a Terminal command). While making them, no passwords were requested.
Then I could finally go back into the django app I was making, edit the settings.py file to include the new superuser, and then run the syncdb command. This actually prompted me to make a new superuser with a password, which I did.
The learning curve is steep on these things! I hope this is helpful to someone else.