Error opening terminal: xterm-256color

PDCurses worked just fine on Windows, but running the same code on macOS with ncurses kept giving me this error:

arcc(86910,0x7fff96138380) malloc: *** error for object 0x14: pointer being freed was not allocated
*** set a breakpoint in malloc_error_break to debug
Abort trap: 6

Pretty nasty looking. So I figured I would start by building the samples that came with the ncurses. I cloned the mirror on github and ran configure and then make all --jobs=8. Amazingly enough everything worked! Except when I went to run a test program I still got an error, but albeit a prettier error:

Error opening terminal: xterm-256color.

After trying a few fixes I found on Google it was this Stack Overflow post that lead to my fix:

export TERMINFO=/usr/share/terminfo
export TERM=xterm-basic

After that the sample programs worked! More importatly, my program worked!