So I was running into this obnoxious error:
psql: FATAL: role "postgres" does not exist
No matter what I did. It basically means that the user is missing. So I had to create the user by hand. First I initialized the database as my current user:
initdb -D /usr/local/pgsql/data
And then I made sure the daemon was running:
postgres -D /usr/local/pgsql/data >logfile 2>&1 &
Then I opened a postgres terminal:
psql template1
And created the postgres user:
create user postgres with password '';
Finally, I gave the postgres user superuser privileges so it can create databases and whatever in my development environment.
alter role postgres with superuser;
Done!