Temporarily preventing a user from connecting

Sometimes, you need to temporarily revoke a user’s connection rights without deleting the user or changing their password. This recipe presents ways of doing this.

Getting ready

To modify other users, you must either be a superuser or have the CREATEROLE privilege (in the latter case, only non-superuser roles can be altered).

How to do it…

Follow these steps to temporarily prevent and reissue the login capability of a user:

1. To temporarily prevent the user from logging in, run this command:

   pguser=# alter user bob nologin;
   ALTER ROLE
   

2. To let the user connect again, run the following command:

   pguser=# alter user bob login;
   ALTER ROLE
   

How it works…

This sets a flag in the system catalog, telling PostgreSQL not to let the user log in. It does not kick out already connected users.

There’s more…

Here are some additional remarks...