Mystery DATABASE_USER=ubuntu Setting

[jherdman]

I’m trying to set up a build environment with PG10. Despite my best efforts I cannot resolve this error:

PG::ConnectionBad: FATAL:  role "ubuntu" does not exist

I’ve tracked this down to an ENV variable DATABASE_USER being set to “ubuntu”. I cannot figure out how or where this variable comes from. I rely upon this env var being set correctly for all of my Rake tasks involving my database connection. Given the size of my app and the effort involved, renaming this variable is too much of a pain. Where does this come from? Why can’t I stomp on this variable? How does I fix this?

Many thanks in advance for any help.

[halfer]

Sounds rather similar to this issue that popped up recently - upstream changes in the official PostgreSQL image:

Postgres image breaking changes (role postgres not found)

Yesterday all our builds suddenly started failing on a project which has postgres:10-alpine-ram set up. I see new tags were built and published yesterday (https://hub.docker.com/r/circleci/postgres/tags/) aligning with when builds started failing. I don’t see any changes to the postgres Dockerfile, so I’m assuming the breaking change is coming from upstream (https://github.com/CircleCI-Public/circleci-dockerfiles/commit/54985a27f8eb93725645801983414be1beea792d). The failure I’m seeing is: 20…

CircleCI Postgres Image suddenly causing problems? "role postgres not found"

Update: To conform with upstream, we’ve removed our default root role/user so that the postgres role/user is automatically created. See this. The TL;DR is if you were using root as your user, either create it via config or use postgres as the user. Hey everyone, Here’s what’s going on and what caused it. The Problem Most of the CircleCI Docker Convenience Images are small CI tweaks we apply to the upstream Docker Library images. So the circleci/postgres image is based on the postgres image. …

[anzecesar]

Have you tried setting POSTGRES_USER = ubuntu in your build environment variables settings?

[jherdman]

Hmmm, yes this does kind of sound like that issue. I’ve even tried the override like @rose mentions here Convenience Images Update: Removing Hardcoded Postgres User

[jherdman]

OK, so I’ve tracked this down to /.circleci-runner-config.json. There’s a line like this:

"Environment":{"CIRCLE_JOB":"set_up_environment","DATABASE_HOST":"localhos

t",“DATABASE_USERNAME”:“ubuntu”},“CircleEnvs”:{“BASH_ENV”:"/tmp/.bash_env-5ba2560858509c00013d28ed-0-build",“CI”:“true”,“CIRCLECI”:“true”,“CIRCLE_BRANCH”:“circle-ci”,“CIRCLE_BUILD_NUM”:“8465”

It turns out I had set some environment variables in the Build Settings of my project. Woo! I’m glad to have tracked this down. It was definitely a fun mystery.