In this post we will resolve the error - Early termination of puma worker.

Note - The reason described below is one of the cause, it is quite possible to reproduce this issue due to another reason.

Let’s begin.

Few days ago, like every normal day I started dev environment rails server and suddenly server log flooded with error message - early-termination-of-worker.

I did not understand at the time why it has happened as I did nothing different. Oh, but there was one thing to note - I had to abruptly shut down mac the day before. Was it even related?

Yes, it was!

While shutting down mac, postgres server was also abruptly closed - leading to stale postmaster.pid file in the system. And the other day when I was trying to start rails server, it was unable to connect to postgres server. The reason was postgres server was unable to start as system had stale postmaster.pid reference.

If you are stuck at how I find out the reason, here it is -

So after knowing the problem, answer was straight forward - Go and delete postmaster.pid file.

How to do it?

I use postgres desktop application, so these were steps for me -

1. Open terminal & navigate to Postgres directory. You can find postgres directory by opening postgres app and clicking on server settings option. My path was -
   /Users/swapnil/Library/Application Support/Postgres/var-13

2. List all files in the directory and check if postmaster.pid file is present.

   ls -a
   

3. Go ahead and remove postmaster.pid -

   rm postmaster.pid
   

.

That’s it. After this step your postgres server should be running & so rails server will be able to connect to it.

P.S. - If you installed postgres via different method then solution steps would be different for you.

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Thanks. Cheers!