this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2025
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so, uh... can you ELI5 this for those of us that don't know anything?
The person you replied to doesn't know what they're talking about. It's just an example password used for running a local empty DB for development and has nothing to do with production or even test databases.
You can see this in the readme: https://archive.softwareheritage.org/browse/origin/directory/?origin_url=https%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fgsa-tts-archived%2Fai-gov-api
See my longer previous comment if you want to know more. And again, not defending this project, but this whole comment chain was just misinformation.
The type of database they are using is called "postgres", which is also it's password.
They should've used "1234"
That's the combo on my luggage!
I will assume this is just the password they use in development. But they should probably be using pglite.
It’s like having your password set to “password”
Postgres, SQLite, etc are tools for database management, things like user data, application data and so on are collected here.
Edit: the
DB_PASS=“postgres”is the default password when setting up a Postgres database.Take Reddit’s Karma system or Upvotes/Downvotes for example, they’re stored in a database and however Reddit wants to utilize that data Postgres makes it easy to call upon it.
I’m sure others can give more detailed responses, I’m typing this out in a rush.
Interesting that you chose Reddit as an example. They have a fascinating origin story with respect to data mart. Early Reddit had just two tables: Thing and Data, where Thing was metadata about types and Data was a three column table with: type, id, and value.
Wrap your head around that. All of Reddit, two tables. A database couldn’t be less normalized (final boss of normal forms) and they did it in an rdb. So horrific it’s actually kind of cool.
I was in a rush! Honestly it was the quickest thing I could come up with on the spot, plus database tools are something I lack a lot of knowledge about so I really couldn’t go in depth even if I wanted to.
Appreciate the history behind Reddit’s database!