Can't connect to PostgreSQL with Rails and Capistrano

Question

I'm trying to deploy my Rails 5 application using Postgres to a VPS via Capistrano. It keeps failing, though - giving me a PG::ConnectionBad: FATAL: password authentication failed for user 'sys_user'.

The relevant settings of my database.yml are:

production:
  <<: *default
  database: <%= ENV['RDS_DB_NAME'] %>
  username: <%= ENV['RDS_USERNAME'] %>
  password: <%= ENV['RDS_PASSWORD'] %>
  host: <%= ENV['RDS_HOSTNAME'] %>
  port: <%= ENV['RDS_PORT'] %>

All these environment variables have been set in /etc/environment - this is definitely the case because it's picking up the RDS_USERNAME as sys_user. The password of the database is the same as the variable RDS_PASSWORD. The port, hostname etc. are all the same also.

I'm stumped. Please help.

Answer 1

Where is the Postgres instance running? I'm guessing that you're trying to migrate an application from Elastic Beanstalk to a non-Amazon host. If that's the case, and your Postgres instance is not actually RDS, you might need to enable password authentication in your config file.

Documentation on Postgres configuration can be found here; I suspect you might need to change ident to md5.