Homebrew is the de facto standard package manager for MacOS. If it works, it's great. However, sometimes things may get messy, so here are some troubleshooting strategies and hints.

The package postgresql@14 is used for the examples below.

Often a simple update may be enough. Upgrade single packages using brew upgrade postgresql@14 or update everything, then clean up any old versions:

brew update
brew upgrade
brew cleanup

Re-install packages:

brew uninstall postgresql@14
brew install postgresql@14

Run services and check if services are actually running:

brew services restart postgresql@14
brew services info postgresql@14

The latter should output something like this:

postgresql@14 (homebrew.mxcl.postgresql@14)
Running: ✔
Loaded: ✔
Schedulable: ✘
User: root
PID: 39526

Homebrew's default folder is: /opt/homebrew/. Packages are located in /opt/homebrew/Cellar. The /var folder is located under /opt/homebrew/var. Under the var-folder, there's a log-folder, i.e. /opt/homebrew/var/log which, you may have guessed it, contains log files. For example, on my development Mac, this contains the log files for Postgres and Redis, which may be useful for troubleshooting.

tail -f /opt/homebrew/var/log/postgresql@14.log