Postgres Current Setting

Using current_setting in postgres is a way of obtaining session/transaction variables. This is incredibly useful for debugging and understanding the environment in which your queries are running.

Setting a Variable

set_config is a way to store a text value in the postgres connection. This function takes in 3 arguments:

setting_name [text], The key of what you want to store.

new_value [text], The value of what you want to store.

is_local [boolean], If true the value will only persist for the current transaction, otherwise will persist for as long as the current session is alive.

The function will return what is entered into new_value.

In practice, it would look like this:

SELECT set_config('auth.uid', '1234', false);

Getting a Variable

current_setting takes in two arguments (the second being optional):

setting_name [text], This is the key of the value you want to get.

missing_ok [boolean?] If false or undefined then will throw an error if the key does not exist, otherwise will return the value.

Using the function would look like this:

SELECT current_setting('auth.uid', true);