I’m falling in love with Postgres as a database but it comes fairly well locked down (good for production, not so good for development). I do all my development in a Vagrant box so a) the environment matches production and b) I don’t pollute my Mac with various conflicting versions of things. Mostly I’ve been using the psql command which is actually pretty good if you can remember all the commands. But sometimes you really want a decent UI for the database, and that’s where Navicat comes in (actually, I use the cheaper Navicat Essentials).

First, you’ll need to to add this line to your Vagrantfile to forward your local

  config.vm.forward_port 5432, 5432                 # postgres

This forwards the local port of 5432 to the Vagrant instance port 5432.

But you’ll still get connection errors because Postgres isn’t configured to allow connections from a non-local address. Add the highlighted line to /etc/postgresql/9.1/main/pg_hba.conf

# "local" is for Unix domain socket connections only
local   all             all                                     md5
# IPv4 local connections:
host    all             all             127.0.0.1/32            md5
host    all             all             10.0.2.2/32             md5

You might also need to add this line to /etc/postgresql/9.1/main/postgresql.conf

listen_addresses = '*'

You can then connect to Postgresql with Navicat using the following options

Navicat connection options