What does --no-acl mean in Postgres?

You have read a guide to doing Postgres exports or imports and seen --no-acl, this is what it means

In Postgres tools like pg_dump and pg_restore you might see example code that mentions --no-acl. Whilst I could read that this said “no ACL”, I didn’t really know what that meant.

When you see --something or -s along with a command, this is a flag. Flags are used to tell the command how to act. In our case, we are saying “Do a Postgres thing, but remember, --no-acl”.

acl is an acronym for Access Control List. An Access Control List stores which people, groups, or systems are allowed access to things. In Postgres, this could mean which users can do things on specific databases.

We are saying --no-acl which means don’t worry about exporting or importing anything to do with access privileges. You would often want to ignore the Access Control List because the database you are importing to will have its own.

You might be wondering what does --no-owner mean too, don’t worry, we’ve got you!


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