Re: [GENERAL] createuser: How to specify a database to connect to - Mailing list pgsql-general

On 03/13/2017 08:44 AM, Guillaume Lelarge wrote:

2017-03-13 16:29 GMT+01:00 Schmid Andreas <Andreas.Schmid@bd.so.ch
<mailto:Andreas.Schmid@bd.so.ch>>:

    Hi

    I'm trying to add a new DB user with the following command from my
    client machine:
    createuser -h my.host.name <http://my.host.name> -U mysuperusername
    --pwprompt newusername

    I'm getting the following message:
    createuser: could not connect to database postgres: FATAL:  no
    pg_hba.conf entry for host "10.0.0.1", user "mysuperusername",
    database "postgres", SSL on

    Now, it's true that our pg_hba.conf doesn't allow access to the
    postgres database. We did this intentionally, as usually no one
    needs to connect to this database.

    So I tried to do
    export PGDATABASE=sogis
    before the createuser command. But no success. Does anyone know of
    another way to achieve what I'm trying?

    I whish to do it with createuser rather than with the SQL command
    CREATE USER because this way I can avoid the password for the new
    user to show up anywhere in the history.

    I'm on 9.2 on Ubuntu 14.04.


You can't. The createuser.c code specifically targets the "postgres"
database, which surprises me. Anyway, the only other way to do it is to
use psql, something like: psql -c "CREATE USER..." -h ... your_database

Unfortunately that stills leaves the password in the Postgres log which is what the OP is trying to avoid. The immediate solution would be to open the postgres database in pg_hba.conf. A longer term solution would be to file an issue and see if the code can be changed to allow specifying a database to createuser.