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Use Coder with an external database

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Recommendation

For production deployments, we recommend using an external PostgreSQL database (version 13 or higher).

Basic configuration

Before starting the control plane, prepare the database server by creating a role and a database. Remember that the role must have access to the created database.

With psql:

CREATE ROLE coder LOGIN SUPERUSER PASSWORD 'secret42';

With psql -U coder:

CREATE DATABASE coder;

Coder configuration is defined via environment variables. The database client requires the connection string provided via the CODER_PG_CONNECTION_URL variable.

export CODER_PG_CONNECTION_URL="postgres://coder:secret42@localhost/coder?sslmode=disable"

Custom schema

For installations with elevated security requirements, it's advised to use a separate schema instead of the public one.

With psql -U coder:

CREATE SCHEMA myschema;

Once the schema is created, you can list all schemas with \dn:

List of schemas
 Name      | Owner
-----------+----------
 myschema  | coder
 public    | postgres
(2 rows)

In this case the database client requires the modified connection string:

export CODER_PG_CONNECTION_URL="postgres://coder:secret42@localhost/coder?sslmode=disable&search_path=myschema"

The search_path parameter determines the order of schemas in which they are visited while looking for a specific table. The first schema named in the search path is called the current schema. By default search_path defines the following schemas:

SHOW search_path;

search_path
--------------
 "$user", public

Using the search_path in the connection string corresponds to the following psql command:

ALTER ROLE coder SET search_path = myschema;

Troubleshooting

`coder server` fails startup with "current_schema: converting NULL to string is unsupported"

Make sure that the schema selected in the connection string ...&search_path=myschema exists and the role has granted permissions to access it. The schema should be present on this listing:

psql -U coder -c '\dn'