Re: Automating pg_Dump on Windows 2016 Server

Simon White schrieb am 14.11.2018 um 20:49:
> Automating pg_dump seems to be unnecessarily difficult from Windows
> Server 2016. I have tried using the PGPASSWORD environment variable
> and the PGPASSFILE environment variable all to no avail. The result
> is that I am always prompted for a password. Could you not create a
> option to pass the password on the command line or the location of a
> password file to be used. That certainly would make things simpler.
>
> Since I was using the "postgres" user I tried setting the password
> under the "postgres" user in pgAdmin4 but that did not help either.
>

I have no problems setting the variable inside a batch file:

setlocal
set PGPASSWORD=verysecret
pg_dump -U myuser -D ....

By default Postgres uses the "Local System" account to run the service. I don't think that is a Windows user for which you can define environment variables. So you would need to define the environment variable as a global one.

If you don't want to use a batch file, you could create a dedicated Windows user where you set the environment variables and then use that user to run the service. But make sure you adjust the privilege on the data directory. Using a batch file for pg_dump is most probably a lot easier.