Configuring PGD CLI v5

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PGD CLI can be installed on any system that can connect to the PGD cluster. To use PGD CLI, you need a user with PGD superuser privileges or equivalent. The PGD user with superuser privileges is the bdr_superuser role. An example of an equivalent user is edb_admin on a BigAnimal distributed high-availability cluster.

PGD CLI and database connection strings

You might not need a database connection string. For example, when Trusted Postgres Architect installs the PGD CLI on a system, it also configures the connection to the PGD cluster, which means that the PGD CLI can connect to the cluster when run.

If you're installing PGD CLI manually, you must give PGD CLI a database connection string so it knows which PGD cluster to connect to.

Setting passwords

PGD CLI doesn't interactively prompt for your password. You must pass your password using one of the following methods:

Adding an entry to your .pgpass password file, which includes the host, port, database name, user name, and password.
Setting the password in the PGPASSWORD environment variable.
Including the password in the connection string.

We recommend the first option, as the other options don't scale well with multiple databases, or they compromise password confidentiality.

If you don't know the database connection strings for your PGD-powered deployment, see discovering connection strings, which helps you to find the right connection strings for your cluster.

Once you have that information, you can continue.

Configuring the database to connect to

PGD CLI takes its database connection information from either the PGD CLI configuration file or the command line.

Using database connection strings in the command line

You can pass the connection string directly to pgd using the --dsn option. For details, see the sample use case. For example:

pgd --dsn "host=bdr-a1 port=5432 user=enterprisedb" show-version

Using a configuration file

Use the pgd-cli-config.yml configuration file to specify the database connection string for your cluster. The configuration file must contain the database connection string for at least one PGD node in the cluster. The cluster name is optional and isn't validated.

For example:

cluster:
  name: cluster-name
  endpoints:
  - "host=bdr-a1 port=5432 dbname=bdrdb user=enterprisedb"
  - "host=bdr-b1 port=5432 dbname=bdrdb user=enterprisedb"
  - "host=bdr-c1 port=5432 dbname=bdrdb user=enterprisedb"

By default, pgd-cli-config.yml is located in the /etc/edb/pgd-cli directory. The PGD CLI searches for pgd-cli-config.yml in the following locations. Precedence order is high to low.

/etc/edb/pgd-cli (default)
$HOME/.edb/pgd-cli

If your configuration file isn't in either of these directories, you can use the optional -f or --config-file flag on a pgd command to set the file to read as configuration. See the sample use case.

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Using PGD CLI

Discovering connection strings