How to pass in password to pg_dump?

Question

I\'m trying to create a cronjob to back up my database every night before something catastrophic happens. It looks like this command should meet my needs:

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Answer 1

the easiest way in my opinion, this: you edit you main postgres config file: pg_hba.conf there you have to add the following line:

host <you_db_name> <you_db_owner> 127.0.0.1/32 trust

and after this you need start you cron thus:

pg_dump -h 127.0.0.1 -U <you_db_user> <you_db_name> | gzip > /backup/db/$(date +%Y-%m-%d).psql.gz

and it worked without password

Answer 2

If you want to do it in one command:

PGPASSWORD="mypass" pg_dump mydb > mydb.dump

Answer 3

Another (probably not secure) way to pass password is using input redirection i.e. calling

pg_dump [params] < [path to file containing password]

Answer 4

Create a .pgpass file in the home directory of the account that pg_dump will run as.

The format is:

hostname:port:database:username:password

Then, set the file's mode to 0600. Otherwise, it will be ignored.

chmod 600 ~/.pgpass

See the Postgresql documentation libpq-pgpass for more details.