Contents

• pgpasswd
  • Installation
    • Compiling
  • Usage

pgpasswd

Change PostgreSQL account password from Linux command line without entering any SQL statement.

pgpasswd has been successfully tested with PostgreSQL 9.5, 9.6, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 and 16 on Linux.

Installation

pgpasswd is a PostgreSQL extension and a standalone executable (no need to install anything in the database, no CREATE EXTENSION to run).

Compiling

This module can be built using the standard PGXS infrastructure. It can also be built using a standard PostgreSQL server installation that includes the corresponding PG development package to be able to compile libpq code: for example to compile with PG 15 on RHEL-like systems postgresql15-devel RPM must be installed.

In both cases the pg_config program must be available in your $PATH:

git clone https://github.com/pierreforstmann/pgpasswd.git 
cd pgpasswd
make 

make install installs pgpasswd to PostgreSQL binaries directory returned by:

pg_config --bindir

Usage

pgpasswd for Postgresql can be compared to passwd on Linux and UNIX systems.

Enter:

• same parameters (host name, port number, user name and database name) as psql to connect to PostgreSQL
• current password once
• new password twice.

Example:

pgpasswd -h localhost -p 5432 -U test -d postgres
Password:
New password:
New password:
Password changed.

Detailed PG client and PG server versions can be displayed with -v option after successfull connexion:

$ ./pgpasswd -h localhost -p 5432 -d postgres -U test -v
Password:
PG libpq version: 150006
conninfo: host=localhost port=5432 dbname=postgres user=test password=test  
PG server version: 160002
New password: