On 8/21/25 09:29, Dominique Devienne wrote:
On Thu, Aug 21, 2025 at 6:00 PM Karsten Hilbert <karsten.hilb...@gmx.net> wrote:
Am Thu, Aug 21, 2025 at 08:46:00AM -0700 schrieb Adrian Klaver:
https://rhaas.blogspot.com/2023/01/surviving-without-superuser-coming-to.html

Thanks, I did, but did not find the answer to: Is there a
way for a role that can manage membership in a group role to
not itself be a member of that group role ?

Yes and no. Depends what you mean by MEMBER...

Read the docs for pg_auth_members. pg_has_role(). create role.
If you have CREATEROLE, and do a CREATE ROLE foo, you'll
have ADMIN on foo, but not SET or INHERIT (but you can grant them to yourself).

That is a matter of choice as described here:

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/runtime-config-client.html

createrole_self_grant (string)

If a user who has CREATEROLE but not SUPERUSER creates a role, and if this is set to a non-empty value, the newly-created role will be granted to the creating user with the options specified. The value must be set, inherit, or a comma-separated list of these. The default value is an empty string, which disables the feature.

The purpose of this option is to allow a CREATEROLE user who is not a superuser to automatically inherit, or automatically gain the ability to SET ROLE to, any created users. Since a CREATEROLE user is always implicitly granted ADMIN OPTION on created roles, that user could always execute a GRANT statement that would achieve the same effect as this setting. However, it can be convenient for usability reasons if the grant happens automatically. A superuser automatically inherits the privileges of every role and can always SET ROLE to any role, and this setting can be used to produce a similar behavior for CREATEROLE users for users which they create.



Also look at pg_auth_members.grantor::regrole::text and you'll see that the
postgres SUPERUSER itself gave you that ADMIN grant. But if you grant yourself
the role, it's a separate pg_auth_members row, and you're now the grantor.

So I didn't spend time studying your specific use case. That's your job :).
But given my painful experience of the past year, I'd answer yes to your
question, on logical grounds. If you see what I mean. --DD


--
Adrian Klaver
adrian.kla...@aklaver.com


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