Enabling Webserver Authentication — pgAdmin 4 9.16 documentation

# Enabling Webserver Authentication

To configure Webserver authentication, you must setup your webserver with any authentication plug-in (such as Shibboleth, HTTP BASIC auth) as long as it sets the REMOTE_USER environment variable. To enable Webserver authentication for pgAdmin, you must configure the Webserver settings in the config_local.py or config_system.py file (see the config.py documentation) on the system where pgAdmin is installed in Server mode. You can copy these settings from config.py file and modify the values for the following parameters:

Parameter | Description
--- | ---
AUTHENTICATION_SOURCES | The default value for this parameter is internal. To enable OAUTH2 authentication, you must include webserver in the list of values for this parameter. you can modify the value as follows: [‘webserver’]: pgAdmin will use only Webserver authentication. [‘webserver’, ‘internal’]: pgAdmin will first try to authenticate the user through webserver. If that authentication fails, then it will return back to the login page where you need to provide internal pgAdmin user credentials for authentication.
WEBSERVER_AUTO_CREATE_USER | Set the value to True if you want to automatically create a pgAdmin user corresponding to a successfully authenticated Webserver user. Please note that password is not stored in the pgAdmin database.
WEBSERVER_REMOTE_USER | To get the web server remote user details, set this variable to any header or environment variable name which comes from the web server after webserver authentication. The default value is REMOTE_USER and the possible values are REMOTE_USER, HTTP_X_FORWARDED_USER, X-Forwarded-User.

Note

If REMOTE_USER does not work, try replacing it with either REMOTE-USER or Remote-user.

## Master Password

In the multi user mode, pgAdmin uses user’s login password to encrypt/decrypt the PostgreSQL server password. In the Webserver authentication, the pgAdmin does not store the user’s password, so we need an encryption key to store the PostgreSQL server password. To accomplish this, set the configuration parameter MASTER_PASSWORD to True, so upon setting the master password, it will be used as an encryption key while storing the password. If it is False, the server password can not be stored.