POSTGRESQL: Ident authentication error

Today,

I was trying to configure POSTGRESQL server in Fedora Linux OS system. On my surprise, when I typed:

# psql -d railsapp_development -U rails_db_user -W

It gave me the following error:

# psql: FATAL: Ident authentication failed for user "username" 

For, solving this issue, you will have to edit the following file:

vim /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf

This file has various functionalites apart from controlling how the user/clients are  authenticated. By default, POSTGRESQL, supporst IDENT based authentication. IDENT based authentication will not allow you to login with -U and -W option. 

The following changes has to be done inside pg_hba.conf file:

# Type    Database     User     CIDR-ADDRESS            METHOD

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

  local        all               all                                                   trust

  host         all               all          127.0.0.1/32                     trust 

Basically you will have to replace ident with trust. 

Now restart the server with the following command:

# /etc/init.d/postgresql restart

After this you will be able to login. 

Note, that I was facing the above mentioned error, when I was trying to invoke the command rake db:migrate in rails.


But after doing the above mentioned changes, migrations started working fine.