Re: createuser: How to specify a database to connect to

Schmid Andreas <Andreas(dot)Schmid(at)bd(dot)so(dot)ch> writes:
> I'm trying to add a new DB user with the following command from my client machine:
> createuser -h 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.

That may have been intentional but it was still a bad decision; the entire
point of the postgres database is to have a default landing-place for
connections that don't need to connect to a specific database within
the cluster.

> 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?

CREATE USER?

> 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.

If by "history" you're worried about the server-side statement log, this
is merest fantasy: the createuser program is not magic, it just constructs
and sends a CREATE USER command for you. You'd actually be more secure
using psql, where (if you're superuser) you could shut off log_statement
for your session first.

If by "history" you mean ~/.psql_history, you could turn that off (psql -n)
or to protect the password specifically, you could use psql's \password
command.

regards, tom lane