Installation via Homebrew

The database will be initialized during installation, so there isn’t a need to run initdb

$ brew install postgres

Here is a quick way of knowing if Postgres was installed via brew, brew initializes the database during installation by postgres -D /usr/local/var/postgres this creating the directory specified.

Manage DB Service

# Starts as a background service
$ brew services start postgresql

# Stop the service manually
$ brew services stop postgresql

# Restart the service
$ brew services restart postgresql

Uninstallation

# If installed via homebrew
$ brew remove postgresql