Configuring postgresql in rails - ruby-on-rails

Question

I am working on a project with a friend. I cloned the application from bitbucket. Everything was fine except postgresql (v9.3.7) . It keeps giving me the following message.
psql: FATAL: password authentication failed for user "ubuntu"
FATAL: password authentication failed for user "ubuntu"
I have created a superuser as well as all the databases. The designated users and the list of all the databases is given below.
ubuntu=# \du
List of roles
Role name | Attributes | Member of
-----------+------------------------------------------------+-----------
divjot | Superuser | {}
postgres | Superuser, Create role, Create DB, Replication | {}
ubuntu | Superuser, Create role, Create DB | {}
List of databases
Name | Owner | Encoding | Collate | Ctype | Access privileges
-----------------+----------+-----------+---------+-------+-----------------------
app_development | ubuntu | SQL_ASCII | C | C |
app_production | ubuntu | SQL_ASCII | C | C |
app_test | ubuntu | SQL_ASCII | C | C |
postgres | postgres | SQL_ASCII | C | C |
template0 | postgres | SQL_ASCII | C | C | =c/postgres +
| | | | | postgres=CTc/postgres
template1 | postgres | SQL_ASCII | C | C | =c/postgres +
| | | | | postgres=CTc/postgres
ubuntu | ubuntu | SQL_ASCII | C | C |
I have always struggled with postgresql configuration in rails. I follow the documentation completely, however, every time I try to clone application or move the code, I always run into problems. I am not sure why I am getting this error. Any help regarding this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!!

Answer 1

Disclaimer: I'm not an expert on pgsql. But I've successfully set up pg/rails in several versions and environments. Here's what I suggest.
Find the pg_hba.conf file. Since you are apparently using Ubuntu, try
cd /
find . -name pg_hba.conf -print 2> /dev/null
This will search your whole disk, which will take a while. But eventually it will provide the path. If it produces more than one, you'll have to resolve which one is correct.
If you know where PG is installed, cd there instead of root.
Now
Verify the auth method for user ubuntu is password or maybe md5. Here is the relevant docs page. If you're interested only in local development, you can change password to trust. But if this is for production, that's a bad idea.
While logged into the pg command line, run
ALTER USER ubuntu PASSWORD 'newpassword';
to ensure the password is what you think it is.
You should post database.yaml or ENV['DATABASE_URL'] settings. In general, database.yaml needs to match precisely what pg expects.
For example:
development:
adapter: postgresql
encoding: unicode
database: app_development
pool: 5
username: ubuntu
password: <your password>
allow_concurrency: true
Caveat: Don't commit production passwords to your repos or even dev passwords if you don't totally control the repo.