How to check if autocommit is on or not postgres' psql

Question

I am using postgres 9.5. How can I check if auto commit is on or off? I tried SHOW AUTOCOMMIT where I got ERROR: unrecognized configuration parameter \"autoco

Answer 1

One quick and dirty way is to just execute commit; and look for the below message to infer auto-commit is on or not.

Error report - SQL Error: Cannot commit when autoCommit is enabled.

Note: I used SQL developer so not sure about other IDEs

Answer 2

According to this Dustin Marx article, you can use:

\echo :AUTOCOMMIT

If it's desired to "always" have autocommit disabled, the \set AUTOCOMMIT off meta-command can be added to one's local ~/.psqlrc file. For an even more global setting, this meta-command can be placed in apsqlrc file in the database's system config directory (which can be located using PostgreSQL operating system-level command pg_config --sysconfdir).