I like the pgAdmin III GUI software, but the GUI uses more bandwidth than SSH console.
psql is not interactive, without menus, tables list, etc.
Does exist some interactive text-mode tool to connect to PostgreSQL ?
There is no text-mode window-and-menu curses/ncurses style text mode interface for PostgreSQL; no ncurses equivalent to PgAdmin-III.
I strongly recommend learning psql and getting comfortable with it. You could use PgAdmin-III remotely as detailed below, but in the long run you'll be massively more productive if you learn psql.
Use PgAdmin-III via ssh tunnels or direct connection
You can always connect with PgAdmin-III via an ssh tunnel or remote TCP/IP connection. That way you aren't transmitting all the GUI data over the network, just the PostgreSQL protocol data.
For ssh, do something like:
ssh -L 15432:localhost:5432 remote_host
then while the ssh session is open, connect to localhost port 15432 to make a connection to the remote DB.
This will work even if the remote DB is only listening on 127.0.0.1. It'll also work if you ssh into a bastion host then connect to the DB server from there; just change localhost in the -L argument to the IP/hostname of the Pg server. For more information see the ssh manual, particularly LocalForward for IP forwarding, ProxyCommand for custom multilayer tunnels, and the -D option for dynamic SOCKS proxying.
It's even possible to use an ssh tunnel to connect to a server that's only listening for unix socket connections, by running socat to proxy between the unix socket and TCP.
None of this will work when you're connecting to a Windows host, but rdp2tcp can be used to tunnel TCP over RDP connections for similar effect. See this question.
Use psql
psql is pretty interactive. Though it isn't a GUI windowing interface, it's hardly just a scripting tool. It provides lots of visibility into the system with the \d commands, lots of info via \h, tab completion, paging, \e break-out command editing, and lots of other interactive features.
Use \? for psql help, and \h SQL_COMMAND for syntax of a particular SQL command, eg \h INSERT.
Related
I recently installed https://dbeaver.io/ on a Windows PC and wish to access a database on a remote Linux server from it.
My Linux username is my_username and I also have a system user psql_user. I also have two existing PostgreSQL databases with the same name as their respective user. Typically, only the psql_user is used and is access by a php-fpm pool listening to a Unix socket and running as user psql_user, and as such have configured /var/lib/pgsql/12/data/pg_hba.conf as:
# TYPE DATABASE USER ADDRESS METHOD
local all all peer
host all all 127.0.0.1/32 ident
host all all ::1/128 ident
local replication all peer
host replication all 127.0.0.1/32 ident
host replication all ::1/128 ident
With the above configuration, after ssh'ing onto the server, I can access the my_username database by executing psql and can also access the psql_user database by executing sudo -u psql_user psql and do not need to use a password for either.
But now, how to connect from the remote Windows PC?
To attempt to do so, I first created ssh keys without passphrases on the Windows PC for both my_username and psql_user and added the public key to each Linux user's authorized_keys (had to manually create /home/psql_user/ because it is a systems user). I can can successfully PuTTY to the server as either using the ssh keys.
Next, on the DBeaver connection settings SSH tab, I checked "Use SSH Tunnel", entered the username and private key location and the Test tunnel configuration successfully shows connected with the client version as SSH-2.0-JSCH-01.54 and server version as SSH-2.0-OpenSSH_7.4. I also made no changes to the Advanced portion of this tab such as local and remote hosts and ports, and have also left the "You can use variables in SSH parameters" at their default values.
Using my server IP in the main tab, Authentication "Database Native", and leave password empty, I test the connection but get The connection attempt failed. syslog reports that connection to the IP on port 5432 failed which makes sense because I am set up using Unix sockets.
So, then I change the server IP on the main tab to 127.0.0.1 (or localhost) and try again but get FATAL: Ident authentication failed for user "my_username". Okay, a little closer, but not quite there.
I think it might be because DBeaver is passing the port so I attempt to disable this part by got to the Edit Driver tab and changing jdbc:postgresql://{host}[:{port}]/[{database}] to jdbc:postgresql://{host}/[{database}], but now get Connection to 127.0.0.1:5432 refused. Check that the hostname and port are correct and that the postmaster is accepting TCP/IP connections.
Not sure where to go next. When I PuTTY into the Linux machine, all is good but not when connecting remotely using DBeaver, and thought it would be the same if I am using SSH to connect DBeaver to the server. How can this be accomplished?
As pointed out in the other answer, DBeaver's SSH tunnel option doesn't support sockets currently. It is always TCP port based, so only connections using the host options in pg_hba.conf can be made (I've placed a feature request for SSH socket forwarding in DBeaver).
Here's how to set up forwarding of a local TCP port to a remote Unix socket. This allows you to use peer authentication over the Unix socket, so you don't have to provide a password for the PostgreSQL role:
ssh username#dbserver.example.com -L 5555:/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.5432 -fN
While I think that ssh tunnelling can be set up to connect to a unix socket rather than a port, I don't think dbeaver offers a way to do that, so you would have to set it up separately.
Although ident should also work if your server runs the identd service. I think most linux don't do that by default, but just apt install oidentd or whatever the equiv would be on your package manager should fix that.
The easier solution would be to just change the method from ident to md5 or scram, and assign a password (which dbeaver offers to memorize).
I am running openerp(odoo) application from amazon cloud server using putty and it is ubuntu Headless(NO GUI) server. PostgreSQL is the database used for this application. Right now I am only able to access it in command mode as there is no gui in Putty. In Windows, I have installed pgadmin3. Is it possible to access it from here by configuring?
You can configure your security group to open up the postgres port accessible from your IP address (I would highly recommend the access to be limited that way). After that you can just point your GUI client the external IP address of your instance using the port where the service is running on.
I suggest you to use pgadmin gui tool to access postgres database.
You can set up an SSH tunnel in putty and use that to access the remote database with your local pgadmin3. This is a very good and secure way to do things.
First, in Putty (Connection / SSH / Tunnels) add a source port of your choice, 5000 for example. Then enter localhost:5432 for Destination (providing postgres is running on port 5432 on the server). Press Add and save your session. Next time you open your ssh connection with Putty, the tunnel will be active.
After this, set up a new connection in pgadmin3, Host: localhost and Port: 5000 (and your username and pasword, of course). Now, if the putty session is active, you should be able to connect.
In postgresql.conf file, find a line called
listen_addresses = 'localhost' and change it to '*'
Next in pg_hba.conf add this line in IPV4 local connections,
host all all (Your external ip address in CIDR format) trust
Finally restart the database using this command,sudo service postgresql restart
While the SSH tunnel functionality in Navicat seems to work well if postgresql is running on a TCP port, it seems impossible for me to make it work when postgresql is accessible using a file socket?!
Is this true, or I am missing something?
Correct. There's no sensible way to connect to a unix socket over a ssh forward. You could possibly use socat to link a forwarded tcp/ip port to a unix socket, but I wouldn't bet on it working.
Just use TCP/IP.
Our production databases are only accessible from the production application servers. I am able to login to production app servers and psql to the db, but I would like to setup a ssh tunnel to allow me to access the production db from my work box.
Ideally, it would be a single command that I could run from my workbox that would set up the tunnel/proxy on the production app server
Here is what I have come up with, but it doesnt work.
user#workbox $ ssh -fNT -L 55555:db.projectX.company.com:5432 app.projectX.company.com
user#workbox $ psql -h app.projectX.company.com -p 55555
psql: could not connect to server: No route to host
Is the server running on host "app.projectX.company.com" (10.1.1.55) and accepting
TCP/IP connections on port 55555?
The reported IP address is incorrect.
When connecting to the tunnel endpoint, the hostname is your local host, since that's where the forwarded port is exposed.
ssh -fNT -L 55555:db.projectX.company.com:5432 app.projectX.company.com
psql -h localhost -p 55555
BTW, PgAdmin-III provides ssh tunnel automation. On the other hand, it's a big GUI app without psql's handy \commands.
It's pretty trivial to write a sshpsql bash script that fires up the ssh tunnel, stores the pid of the ssh process, launches psql, lets you do what you want, and on exit kills the ssh tunnel. You'll also want to TRAP "kill $sshpid" EXIT so you kill the tunnel on unclean exits.
I have a Postgres database on a linux server. I have root access which in turn can give me access to the database. In Windows you get PGAdminIII, which I would love to use to connect to the Linux server. I heard that tunneling might be necessary. I am not sure if that is true, or what it is really. Can anyone shed some light on the easiest way to get access to the database?
Tunneling is not strictly necessary. As long as you have port 5432 not firewalled, you should be able to connect to your Linux PostgreSQL server without much trouble.
You can check this from your Windows box by using this command from cmd console:
telnet linuxbox 5432
If you get black screen (not an error), then everything looks good and port 5432 should be open. Note that on Windows 7 you may need to enable telnet client (it is disabled by default) using this command:
pkgmgr /iu:"TelnetClient"
If your server is not located in your local network, or if you are concerned about security like somebody using network sniffer to watch your traffic, you should configure SSL/TLS on your PostgreSQL server - it is not very difficult to do, and completely free when using self-signed certificate.
Note that by default Postgres on Linux does not listen on network interfaces, you may need to enable it by editing postgresql.conf.