I’m trying to get Lemmy up and running on an Ubuntu 22.04 host. I’ve followed this guide supplemented by googling.
I can actually get to the front end, but it gives me “There was an error on the server.” When I dig into the logs, I see this:
"thread 'main' panicked at 'Error connecting to postgres://lemmy:<my pg password>@postgres:5432/lemmy: FATAL: password authentication failed for user \"lemmy\"\n","stream":"stderr","time":"2023-06-26T03:14:17.47460915Z"}
The only thing I can find about this error related to Lemmy is this thread, which indicates that the password was not defined in the docker-compose.yml file prior to starting the containers. I have since redone the configuration three times, each time deleting the volumes folder and double-checking that my postgre password is correct both in docker-compose.yml and lemmy.hjson.
Any ideas what might be the problem? Thank you kindly for any help you can provide!
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First of all, make sure the PostgreSQL username matches as well.
Does your password contain any special characters such as quotes, dollar signs or backslashes? They can have special meanings in yaml, resulting in the password being different from what you’d expect.
Username definitely matches!
And yes, I have several special characters, but the password is surrounded by single quotes in
docker-compose.yml, so that should not matter, right?At the very least, dollar signs will still matter, due to environment variable interpolation.
This makes sense, and I do have a dollar sign in my password…
However, I have confirmed that postgres does in fact parse the password correctly, as I can log in with the defined username/password combo directly using
psqlSo I think that disproves this theory, doesn’t it?
edit: I tried getting rid of the dollar sign just in case… unfortunately I’m still getting the same error
Are you sure you don’t have a return character in the user name after “lemmy” accidentally? I haven’t set up an instance but it looks like that could be your issue.
Do you get the same error by running psql on terminal?
Frustratingly, when you use psql on the terminal, it does not prompt you for a password. So I’m still not sure if the password works or not :(
Ahh, ok… if you add the
-Woption when logging in to psql (psql -U lemmy -W), it will prompt for the password.The password works! So, apparently it’s something with the connection string.
I don’t know how to do this yet, but this will be the first thing I try this morning.
You can try setting a different password, maybe it’s got a character in it that messes with things. Or try URL-encoding the password in
lemmy.hjson.You can also use a PostgreSQL client like the
psqlcommand line tool or a full fat DB client like DBeaver and try connecting to it and see if it accepts your password or not.Example with just Docker and the PostgreSQL container you’re already running:
max-p@lemmy-host ~/lemmy % docker exec -it lemmy-postgres-1 /bin/bash postgres:/# psql -h 172.16.32.5 -U lemmy -W Password: psql (15.3) Type "help" for help. lemmy=# \dt List of relations Schema | Name | Type | Owner --------+----------------------------+-------+------- public | __diesel_schema_migrations | table | lemmy [... more tables ...]It’ll at least give you pointers as to where the issue lies: on the database side or lemmy’s side.
Thank you for enlightening me on the
-Woption in psql. I have successfully logged in using the expected password for lemmy. This points to something with the connection string. According to the error log, the connection string being used is:postgres://lemmy:<my percent-encoded password>@postgres:5432/lemmyAs far as I can tell, the percent encoding is correct. Any ideas how to troubleshoot this further?
edit: it just occurred to me that my container name is
lemmy_postgres_1, notpostgresas was entered in mylemmy.hjsonfile. Let’s see if changing that will work…edit2: no, that had no effect. I’m getting the authentication error for user lemmy on both the lemmy container and the postgres container. :(
