PostgreSQL: Upgrading your user to a superuser

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

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;