'password authentication failed for user “postgres”'

Question

I have installed PostgreSQL 8.4, Postgres client and Pgadmin 3. Authentication failed for user "postgres" for both console client and Pgadmin. I have typed user as "postgres" and password "postgres", because it worked before. But now authentication is failed. I did it before a couple of times without this problem. What should I do? And what happens?

psql -U postgres -h localhost -W
Password for user postgres: 
psql: FATAL:  password authentication failed for user "postgres"
FATAL:  password authentication failed for user "postgres"

Answer 1

If I remember correctly the user postgres has no DB password set on Ubuntu by default. That means, that you can login to that account only by using the postgres OS user account.

Assuming, that you have root access on the box you can do:

sudo -u postgres psql

If that fails with a database "postgres" does not exists error, then you are most likely not on a Ubuntu or Debian server :-) In this case simply add template1 to the command:

sudo -u postgres psql template1

If any of those commands fail with an error psql: FATAL: password authentication failed for user "postgres" then check the file /etc/postgresql/8.4/main/pg_hba.conf: There must be a line like this as the first non-comment line:

local   all         postgres                          ident

For newer versions of PostgreSQL ident actually might be peer. That's OK also.

Inside the psql shell you can give the DB user postgres a password:

ALTER USER postgres PASSWORD 'newPassword';

You can leave the psql shell by typing CtrlD or with the command \q.

Now you should be able to give pgAdmin a valid password for the DB superuser and it will be happy too. :-)

Answer 2

The response of staff is correct, but if you want to further automate can do:

$ sudo -u postgres psql -c "ALTER USER postgres PASSWORD 'postgres';"

Done! You saved User = postgres and password = postgres.

If you do not have a password for the User postgres ubuntu do:

$ sudo passwd postgres

Answer 3

This was frustrating, most of the above answers are correct but they fail to mention you have to restart the database service before the changes in the pg_hba.conf file will take affect.

so if you make the changes as mentioned above:

local all postgres ident

then restart as root ( on centos its something like service service postgresql-9.2 restart ) now you should be able to access the db as the user postgres

$psql
psql (9.2.4)
Type "help" for help.

postgres=# 

Hope this adds info for new postgres users

Answer 4

Edit the pg_hba.conf file, for Debian on /etc/postgresql/9.3/main/pg_hba.conf and for Red Hat/IBM derivates at /var/lib/pgsql/9.4/data/pg_hba.conf

• Change all authentication methods to trust.
• Change Linux Password for postgres user.
• Restart Server.
• Login with psql -h localhost -U postgres and use the just set Unix password.
• If it works you should re-set the pg_hba.conf file to values with md5 or ident methods and restart.

Answer 5

For those who are using it first time and have no information regarding what the password is they can follow the below steps(assuming you are on ubuntu):

1. Open the file pg_hba.conf in /etc/postgresql/9.x/main

    sudo vi pg_hba.conf 
   

   2.edit the below line

    local   all             postgres                                peer
   

   to

    local   all             postgres                                trust
   

2. Restart the server

     sudo service postgresql restart
   

3. Finally you can login without need of a password as shown in the figure

Ref here for more info

Answer 6

As a rule of thumb: YOU SHOULD NEVER EVER SET A PASSWORD FOR THE POSTGRES USER.

If you need a superuser access from pgAdmin, make another superuser. That way, if the credentials for that superuser is compromised, you can always ssh into the actual database host and manually delete the superuser using

sudo -u postgres -c "DROP ROLE superuser;"

Answer 7

Try to not use the -W parameter and leave the password in blank. Sometimes the user is created with no-password.

If that doesn't work reset the password. There are several ways to do it, but this works on many systems:

$ su root
$ su postgres
$ psql -h localhost
> ALTER USER postgres with password 'YourNewPassword';

Answer 8

If you are trying to login postgres shell as postgres user, then you can use following commands.

switch to postgres user

# su - postgres

login to psql

# psql

Hope that helps

Answer 9

Once you are in your postgres shell, Enter this command

postgres=# \password postgres

After entering this command you will be prompted to set your password , just set the password and then try.

Answer 10

When you install postgresql no password is set for user postgres, you have to explicitly set it on Unix by using the command:

sudo passwd postgres

It will ask your sudo password and then promt you for new postgres user password. Source

Answer 11

Ancient thread, but I wasted half a day dealing with this in 2020, so this might help someone: Double-check your postgres port (on Ubuntu, it's in /etc/postgresql/9.5/main/postgresql.conf). The psql client defaults to using port 5432, BUT in my case, the server was running on port 5433. The solution was to specify the -p option in psql (e.g. psql --host=localhost --username=user -p 5433 mydatabase).

If you leave off the --host parameter, psql will connect via a socket, which worked in my case, but my Golang app (which uses TCP/IP) did not. Unfortunately, the error message was password authentication failed for user "user", which was misleading. The fix was to use a url connection string with the port (e.g. postgres://user:password@localhost:5433/mydatabase).

My setup was Ubuntu 18.04 on Digital Ocean, with postgres 9.5 installed via apt-get, so not sure why this happened. Hope this saves you some time.

Answer 12

If you see error

FATAL:  password authentication failed for user "postgres"

and you are sure that your password is correct, check that the password has any special characters, especially "%" or slashes. In my case, it was "%" in the password string. After removing this symbol, everything works fine.

Answer 13

Time flies!

On version 12, I have to use "password" instead of "ident" here:

local   all             postgres                                password

Connect without using the -h option.

Answer 14

I faced the same error on Windows 10. In my case, when I setup the Postgres, my username was postgres by default. But when I ran the command psql, it as showing my the username as jitender which is my machine name, and I don't know why this username had been setup.

Anyway to solved it, I did the following steps: Run the command psql --help

• In the output, look for the Connection Option, here you will see your default user, in my case it as jitender.
• You will also get the command to set the anoter username, which should be psql --username postgres. You set the username whatever you require, and that's all, problem got solved.

Answer 15

First of All password crate

ALTER USER postgres with encrypted password 'postgres';

then service restart:

sudo systemctl restart postgresql.service

End.

Answer 16

Here are some combinations which I tried to login:

# login via user foo
psql -Ufoo -h localhost

sudo -u postgres psql postgres

# user foo login to postgres db
psql -Ufoo -h localhost -d postgres

Answer 17

In my case, Ubuntu 20.04 Postgresql 12 was using the wrong port.

I've checked /etc/postgresql/12/main/postgresql.conf and realized it was 5433 instead of 5432.

Answer 18

I just wanted to add that you should also check if your password is expired.

See Postgres password authentication fails for details.

Answer 19

i had a similar problem. Ubuntu was left me log in in console with any password for superuser. Except when i connected with -h localhost in psql line command.

I Observed too that "localhost:8080/MyJSPSiteLogIn" - showed: Fatal: autentication error with user "user".

pg_hba.conf was ok.

I noted had two versions of postgres running in the same service.

Solved - uninstalling inutil version.

Answer 20

I had faced similar issue. While accessing any database I was getting below prompt after updating password "password authentication failed for user “postgres”" in PGAdmin

---

Solution:

1. Shut down postgres server
2. Re-run pgadmin
3. pgadmin will ask for password.
4. Please enter current password of mentioned user

Hope it will resolve your issue

Answer 21

This happens due to caching.

When you run, php artisan config:cache, it will cache the configuration files. Whenever things get change, you need to keep running it to update the cache files. But, it won't cache if you never run that command.

This is OK for production, since config don't change that often. But during staging or dev, you can just disable caching by clearing the cache and don't run the cache command

So, just run php artisan config:clear, and don't run the command previously to avoid caching.

Check original post

Password authentication failed error on running laravel migration

Answer 22

In my case, its Password was longer than 100 characters. Setting it to a smaller character password worked.

Actually I am wondering is there a reference somewhere to that.

Answer 23

Please remember if you have two versions of Postgres installed you need to Uninstall one of them, in my case on MacOS I had one version installed via .dmg and one via brew.

What worked for me was to uninstall the one installed via .dmg using the following steps

1. Go to /Library/PostgreSQL/13.
2. Open uninstall-postgres.app.

then try

psql postgres

it should work.

Answer 24

Answer given is almost correct just missing some pointers which i'll be taking care of in my solution

First make sure your user have a sudo access if not you can use the below command to add your user as sudo user :-

sudo adduser <username> sudo

The change will take effect the next time the user logs in.

i) Now go to sudo vim /etc/postgresql/<your_postgres_version>/main/pg_hba.conf file and look for line that says :

local   all             postgres                                md5 #peer

and comment that. Just below that line there must be a commented line that says:

local   all             postgres                                peer

or for older versions it'll be :-

local   all         postgres                          ident

Uncomment that line.

ii) Now restart the postgres by using any of these commands :-

sudo /etc/init.d/postgresql restart

OR

sudo service postgresql restart

iii) Now you can simply log into postgres using the following command :

sudo -u postgres psql

iv) once you're in you can create any operation you want to in my case i wanted to create a new database you can do the same using below command :

CREATE DATABASE airflow_replica;

Answer 25

In my case it was so simple! I was taken error in application JAVA Spring because I needed remember the Database Superuser, it is showed during the install process PostgreSQL, in my case the datasource would be postgres. So, I added correctly the name and it works!

Answer 26

I hope this will help you short of time. You can change the password of postgres sql by using bellow command.

Command

sudo -u postgres psql

And next you can update the password

Command

Alter user postgres password 'YOUR_NEW_PASSWORD';

Answer 27

1. Open pg_hba.conf in any text editor (you can find this file in your postgres instalation folder);
2. Change all the methods fields to trust (meaning you don't need a password for postgre);
3. Run in your console this comand: "alter user postgres with password '[my password]';" | psql -U postgres (meaning to alter some user password for [my password] for the user as parameter -U postgres)
4. Et voilà (don't forget to change back the method from trust for the one that should be best for you)

I hope this help someone someday.