For more information on Homebrew Services, read this excellent blog post that explains how it works. If you don’t have Homebrew Services installed, just $ brew tap homebrew/services To verify that the local postgres daemon isn’t running, check your installed homebrew services: $ brew services list Now you can use psql to connect to remote Postgres servers, and won’t be running a local one, although you could if you really wanted to. Or, if you don't want/need a background service you can just run: To have launchd start postgresql now and restart at login: => /usr/local/Cellar/postgresql/9.6.5/bin/initdb /usr/local/var/postgres So the “correct way” to get the psql application is indeed to install the postgres formula, and you’ll see toward the bottom of the “caveats” section that it doesn’t actually run the database, it just puts the files on your system: $ brew install postgres Homebrew only really has the postgres formula, and doesn’t have any specific formula that only installs the psql tool. In my case, the directory location is: /usr/local/Cellar/libpq/10.3/bin You then add the installation directory to your path. This would give you psql, pg_dump and a whole bunch of other client utilities without installing Postgres. You could also use homebrew to install libpq. But many users need only psql without a local database (I have it on AWS).
