Postgresql: password authentication failed for user “postgres”

Question

I have installed PostgreSQL 8.4, Postgres client and Pgadmin 3. Authentication failed for user \"postgres\" for both console client and Pgadmin. I have typed user as \"postg

Answer 1

Ancient thread, but I wasted half a day dealing with this in 2020, so this might help someone: Double-check your postgres port (on Ubuntu, it's in /etc/postgresql/9.5/main/postgresql.conf). The psql client defaults to using port 5432, BUT in my case, the server was running on port 5433. The solution was to specify the -p option in psql (e.g. psql --host=localhost --username=user -p 5433 mydatabase).

If you leave off the --host parameter, psql will connect via a socket, which worked in my case, but my Golang app (which uses TCP/IP) did not. Unfortunately, the error message was password authentication failed for user "user", which was misleading. The fix was to use a url connection string with the port (e.g. postgres://user:password@localhost:5433/mydatabase).

My setup was Ubuntu 18.04 on Digital Ocean, with postgres 9.5 installed via apt-get, so not sure why this happened. Hope this saves you some time.