Give all the permissions to a user on a DB

Question

I would like to give an user all the permissions on a database without making it an admin. The reason why I want to do that is that at the moment DEV and PROD are different

Answer 1

The user needs access to the database, obviously:

GRANT CONNECT ON DATABASE my_db TO my_user;

And (at least) the USAGE privilege on the schema:

GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA public TO my_user;

Or grant USAGE on all custom schemas:

DO
$$
BEGIN
   -- RAISE NOTICE '%', (  -- use instead of EXECUTE to see generated commands
   EXECUTE (
   SELECT string_agg(format('GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA %I TO my_user', nspname), '; ')
   FROM   pg_namespace
   WHERE  nspname <> 'information_schema' -- exclude information schema and ...
   AND    nspname NOT LIKE 'pg\_%'        -- ... system schemas
   );
END
$$;

Then, all permissions for all tables (requires Postgres 9.0 or later).
And don't forget sequences (if any):

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA public TO my_user;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON ALL SEQUENCES IN SCHEMA public TO my_user;

For older versions you could use the "Grant Wizard" of pgAdmin III (the default GUI).

There are some other objects, the manual for GRANT has the complete list as of Postgres 12:

privileges on a database object (table, column, view, foreign table, sequence, database, foreign-data wrapper, foreign server, function, procedure, procedural language, schema, or tablespace)

But the rest is rarely needed. More details:

• How to manage DEFAULT PRIVILEGES for USERs on a DATABASE vs SCHEMA?
• Grant privileges for a particular database in PostgreSQL
• How to grant all privileges on views to arbitrary user

Consider upgrading to a current version.