Re: pg_dumpall and authentication

On Nov 9, 2007, at 8:52 AM, Tom Hart wrote:

> I'm sure you guys have heard this about 100 times, and I've done
> some research on Google and found out some things, but I still have
> a couple questions.
>
> As I'm sure you may have guessed from the subject, I'm trying to
> schedule (under windows) pg_dumpall to run each night/morning/full
> moon/whatever. The hitch in this is that it asks for a password for
> each database as it dumps it. I know I can use the PGPASS
> environment variable, or a ~/.pgpass file. What I'm wondering is
> what's considered 'best practice' in practical applications. What
> solutions do you guys use? Is it worth changing PGPASSFILE to point
> to a different .pgpass?

Any of those approaches should be fine. I'd probably stick with the
default pgpass file, just for the sake of whoever may have to
maintain it next.

I tend to create a unix user just for doing backups and other
scheduled maintenance, then give that user access to the database via
ident authentication from the local system only. If PG-on-Windows has
equivalent functionality that's another approach to consider.

Cheers,
Steve