Administration

Administration guide for pgcli

Shell Completion

Enable tab completion for commands, flags, and instance names.

Bash

# Linux
pg completion bash > /etc/bash_completion.d/pg

# macOS (with Homebrew bash-completion)
pg completion bash > $(brew --prefix)/etc/bash_completion.d/pg

# Or load in current session
source <(pg completion bash)

Zsh

# Enable completion system (once)
echo "autoload -U compinit; compinit" >> ~/.zshrc

# Install completion
pg completion zsh > "${fpath[1]}/_pg"

Fish

pg completion fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/pg.fish

PowerShell

pg completion powershell > pg.ps1
# Source from your PowerShell profile

PostgreSQL Configuration

Modify PostgreSQL runtime parameters via pg exec with ALTER SYSTEM, then reload:

# Change a parameter
pg exec "ALTER SYSTEM SET work_mem = '256MB'"
pg exec "SELECT pg_reload_conf()"

# For a specific instance
pg exec -i proj01 "ALTER SYSTEM SET effective_cache_size = '4GB'"
pg exec -i proj01 "SELECT pg_reload_conf()"

Note: Some parameters (e.g. shared_buffers, max_connections) require a restart rather than reload. Use pg stop && pg start to apply those changes.

Configuration File Management

Inspect or validate the config file (~/.pgcli/pg.yaml by default, override with -c).

# Show current configuration (YAML)
pg config show

# Show configuration as JSON
pg config show --json

# Validate config file structure
pg config validate

Init generates a default config; --add creates a named instance in the same file, -o writes to a custom path:

pg config init --add default --base-dir /data/pg
pg config init --add proj01 --base-dir /data/pg -o ./my-pg.yaml

Isolation parameters for running multiple configs on one host (see Quick Start for planning):

pg config init --namespace t1 --pg-start-port 38000 --pg-ssh-port 43000 --add proj01 -o ~/.pgcli-t1/pg.yaml

Parameter	Default	Meaning
`--namespace`	`default`	Prefix for container names: `pgcli-pg-<namespace>-<instance>`, backup container `pgcli-backup-<namespace>`. Pass `--namespace ""` to keep legacy names without a prefix
`--pg-start-port`	`35432`	First PG host port in the allocation range
`--pg-ssh-port`	`42201`	First SSH host port in the allocation range

All three are saved into the config file (namespace, pg_start_port, pg_ssh_port); use disjoint port ranges across configs so allocations never collide.