How to pass in password to pg_dump?

Question

I\'m trying to create a cronjob to back up my database every night before something catastrophic happens. It looks like this command should meet my needs:

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Answer 1

Create a .pgpass file in the home directory of the account that pg_dump will run as.

The format is:

hostname:port:database:username:password

Then, set the file's mode to 0600. Otherwise, it will be ignored.

chmod 600 ~/.pgpass

See the Postgresql documentation libpq-pgpass for more details.