Thread: hiding the postgres password - v8.1.0

Hi,

Is there a way to hide or encrypt the postgres password when the postgres
user is required to be the user in a shell script?   This way we could have
a function called in a program, and the users could do something with out
actually seeing the postgres user password.

We have tried putting the postgres user password in a perl script, however
when we run the script we get password coming up interactively as the perl
script is running doing a pg_dump or createdb for example.

We want regular users to be able to pg_dump, drop, create, vacuum etc.
Postgres is the owner of our data directory.  The group permission are in a
sys - admin group.

Thanks for any feedback,
~DjK

Mr. Dan wrote:

> Is there a way to hide or encrypt the postgres password when the postgres
> user is required to be the user in a shell script?   This way we could have
> a function called in a program, and the users could do something with out
> actually seeing the postgres user password.

See the docs for the .pgpass file, in the libpq section (Interfaces).

--
Alvaro Herrera                                http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support

On Mon, Mar 20, 2006 at 17:23:43 -0400,
  Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> wrote:
> Mr. Dan wrote:
>
> > Is there a way to hide or encrypt the postgres password when the postgres
> > user is required to be the user in a shell script?   This way we could have
> > a function called in a program, and the users could do something with out
> > actually seeing the postgres user password.
>
> See the docs for the .pgpass file, in the libpq section (Interfaces).

You also might consider using ident authentication if the scripts run on the
database server and the OS supports getting the id of who is connected to
a domain socket.