Troubleshooting postgres

Recently tried upgrading postgresql to 9.3 from 9.1 with Chef. The service kept failing to start and nothing was coming out in the error log. Was able to see something was wrong with my configuration file and fix the issue by manually running the server with the line below.

sudo su postgres -c '/usr/lib/postgresql/9.3/bin/postgres -D /var/lib/postgresql/9.3/main -c unix_socket_directories=/var/run/postgresql -c config_file=/etc/postgresql/9.3/main/postgresql.conf'