You can install PostgreSQL server and client from Homebrew: brew install postgresql When you're finished, you can skip to the Final Steps. Follow the instructions and run them: # To have launchd start mysql at login:īy default the mysql user is root with no password. Once this command is finished, it gives you a couple commands to run. You can install MySQL server and client from Homebrew: brew install mysql If you're coming from PHP, you may already be familiar with MySQL. If you're new to Ruby on Rails or databases in general, I strongly recommend setting up PostgreSQL. There is a lot of documentation on both, so you can just pick one that seems like you'll be more comfortable with.

You'll probably want something more robust like MySQL or PostgreSQL. Chances are you won't want to use it because it's stored as a simple file on disk. Rails ships with sqlite3 as the default database.

We're going to install sqlite3 from homebrew because we can't use the built-in version with macOS Sierra without running into some troubles.