Read more

PostgreSQL: Upgrading your user to a superuser

Dominik Schöler
February 06, 2018Software engineer at makandra GmbH

Your default postgres user is named like your linux user. That default user has limited access privileges, which can cause issues such as:

  • DatabaseCleaner needs to disable foreign key constraints before it can wipe the database.
  • Importing a remote dump with geordi Show archive.org snapshot
  • Asking Postgres to show the storage path of a database
Illustration web development

Do you need DevOps-experts?

Your development team has a full backlog? No time for infrastructure architecture? Our DevOps team is ready to support you!

  • We build reliable cloud solutions with Infrastructure as code
  • We are experts in security, Linux and databases
  • We support your dev team to perform
Read more Show archive.org snapshot

Doing these things without a superuser will show a Postgres error or (in Ruby) raise PG::InsufficientPrivilege.

To do so, the application's PostgreSQL user must be a superuser. Grant superuser rights like this:

$ sudo -u postgres psql
# ALTER USER <your username> WITH SUPERUSER;
Posted by Dominik Schöler to makandra dev (2018-02-06 15:51)