Postgresql – PgAdmin 4 – How to connect to database via ssh tunnel as posgres when its password is empty

It's possible that you're being bitten by this PgAdmin bug (changelog):

2012-11-28 AV 1.16.1 Date picker controls returns a full timestamp by default, which can cause inadvertent date changes on jobs and role validty dates. Ignore the time part.

This bug has been seen to set password expiry dates far in the past, such as 1/1/1970. In this case the error message when trying to connect is no different than with a wrong password.

You can check these expiry dates with:

SELECT usename,valuntil FROM pg_user;

and if they're wrong, reset them with:

ALTER USER username VALID UNTIL 'infinity';

and upgrade pgAdmin.

See this part of the pg_dump manpage:

   -W, --password
       Force pg_dump to prompt for a password before connecting to a database.
       This option is never essential, since pg_dump will automatically prompt
       for a password if the server demands password authentication. 

Don't use -W at all. In your case, it's just confusing.

Also, you need to know that the fact that the server asks for a password or not is not driven by the existence of this password.

It's driven by the server-side pg_hba.conf file that you need to study and possibly modify according to your needs (don't forget to reload the server after modifying it).

EDIT: reviewing your pg_hba.conf. The relevant lines are:

# TYPE  DATABASE        USER            ADDRESS                 METHOD
local   all             postgres                                peer
local   all             all                                     peer
host    all             all             127.0.0.1/32            md5
host    all             all             ::1/128                 md5

The 1st line concerns the postgres user. It's irrelevant for your pg_dump command since you're using the santa user with -U santa

The 2nd line concerns any other connection through Unix domain sockets (TYPE column is local). From the client, it means when you do not use -h localhost. It says that if the OS user is the same name than the db user, he doesn't need a password.

The 3rd line says that if -h localhost is used (IPv4 TCP connection), a password will always be asked to the client. The 4th line says the same with IPv6.

Based on this, this command run by the santa OS user should not ask or need a password:

 pg_dump --no-owner myapp_db > myapp_db_backup.sql

-U santa is optional because the db username is taken as the OS user by default.