Connecting to RDBMS from MacOS

Follow these steps on a Mac to generate your public/private keys and access the PostgreSQL server.

Access Terminal

Terminal (Terminal.app) is the terminal emulator included in the macOS operating system. You can use this application to generate your SSH key.

1. Open a new Finder window
2. Navigate to the Applications folder
3. Navigate to the Utilities folder
4. Open the Terminal app

Generate Key

From Terminal, follow these instructions (see screenshot below):

1. Type: ssh-keygen -t rsa
2. Hit return to use the default file / location
3. Enter a passphrase
4. Enter your passphrase again
5. Type: cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

In the screenshot below:

• (a) is the location and filename of your private key
• (b) is the location and filename of your public key
• (c) are the contents of your public key

Connect to PostgreSQL

Copy your public key and provide it to your Medic contact or RDBMS administrator. Your public key is not sensitive and can be shared over slack, github, etc…

Once the RDBMS administrator has added your public SSH key on RDBMS, the administrator will provide you with login credentials to the SSH server as well as for PostgreSQL.

Verify you can successfully connect to to the SSH server with ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa <user>@<rdbms host> -p <port>. If your setup is correct, you should login to the server and see the prompt of your terminal change to <user>@rdbms:~$

You should be able to access PostgreSQL from a SQL client using the provided credentials. Some common SQL clients include: pgAdmin, DBeaver, Postico.

From your SQL client, use the settings mentioned below to connect. Be sure to select the Private Key that you generated above.

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