pgbouncer bind(): Permission denied

Question

I have pgbouncer running locally with config:

[databases]
* = host=myremoteIP port=5432 user=postgres
listen_addr = *
listen_port = 6432

When I connect using pgsql using:

psql -h 127.0.0.1 -p 6432 -U postgres -W

I receive an error:

psql: ERROR: pgbouncer cannot connect to server

/var/log/pgbouncer/pgbouncer.log contains the following:

WARNING Cannot listen on unix:/var/run/postgresql/.s.PGSQL.6432: bind(): Permission denied

Disabling the firewall on the local and remote machines still results in the same error.

What configuration am I missing?

Answer 1

The error message in the log was a red herring, and due to the configuration for Unix sockets (when I only needed TCP). Disabling Unix sockets by setting the unix_socket_dir to an empty string (as per the documentation) made those errors disappear from the logs.

The connection problem was because I needed to specify the password in the pgbouncer.ini file.

The line:

* = host=myremoteIP port=5432 user=postgres

Needed to be:

* = host=myremoteIP port=5432 user=postgres password=mypassword

I can now connect using psql.