PostgreSQL Setup on openSUSE [Linux] pgAdmin4 Authentication Issue (peer, ident to md5)

These days I decided to start learning SQL and tried installing PostgreSQL on my openSUSE 15.6 machine. In Windows it's just one installer and done. But in Linux, I got totally stuck.

First I added the PostgreSQL repo and managed to run the server using the terminal. Then I needed pgAdmin4 for GUI, but there’s no official package for openSUSE. After searching for a long time I found it on Flatpak and installed it.

When I tried to register my local server in pgAdmin, I got this error:

FATAL: Ident authentication failed for user "postgres"

For hours I couldn’t understand what this meant. Then I found that openSUSE by default uses peer or ident authentication. That means your Linux username must match the PostgreSQL username.

I was logged in as sourav, but trying to connect as postgres, so it kept failing.

The fix I found was to edit the pg_hba.conf file and change the authentication method to md5, restart PostgreSQL, and set a password for the postgres user. After that, everything worked smoothly.

This small struggle taught me so much about how Linux handles permissions and how database authentication really works.