Setting Pakyow for local development with Postgres

In the blog post about connection to postgres, http://ift.tt/1DxWvp8, how do you deal with Postgres setup and required password errors?

I've been developing in Nitrous.io but now setting up local development. So I set the DATABASE_URL as in the post but trying to run pakyow server it gives an error about: "pg::connectionbad: fe_sendauth: no password"

The only user in Postgres is 'postgres' and it has a password associated. It wouldn't let me install without creating a password.

Also, is it bad practice to not have a Postgres password for local dev? Articles about it weren't clear (and were related to Rails) and mentioned database.yml storing the password, which Pakyow doesn't seem to have.