PostgreSQL – Using pg_dump and pg_restore Without Roles

You specified #!/bin/sh in your script's shabang line. This gives you a POSIX shell. Under POSIX style shells you can only specify numbers for redirection, as noted in the documentation under section 2.7 Redirection.

&> is a "bashism", shown here in the bash documentation under io-redirection.

This can cause undefined behavior under POSIX compliant shells acting as /bin/sh, and by running shellcheck -s sh on the contents of the script in the above question, as stated under the warning for SC2039, which warns that &> is non-standard, and might fail under different contexts.

You might have better luck, if you specify #!/usr/bin/env bash, or if you change the way that you're doing the redirection, if you want to keep using the #!/bin/sh shell.

As for the $BACKUP_PATH, you might want to double-quote it to prevent any sort of weirdnesses with globbing or word splitting that can happen, which could also possibly explain the zero size tar file.

Hope that helps. =)

The error is harmless but to get rid of it, I think you need to break this restore into two commands, as in:

dropdb -U postgres mydb && \
 pg_restore --create --dbname=postgres --username=postgres pg_backup.dump

The --clean option in pg_restore doesn't look like much but actually raises non-trivial problems.

For versions up to 9.1

The combination of --create and --clean in pg_restore options used to be an error in older PG versions (up to 9.1). There is indeed some contradiction between (quoting the 9.1 manpage):

--clean Clean (drop) database objects before recreating them

and

--create Create the database before restoring into it.

Because what's the point of cleaning inside a brand-new database?

Starting from version 9.2

The combination is now accepted and the doc says this (quoting the 9.3 manpage):

--clean Clean (drop) database objects before recreating them. (This might generate some harmless error messages, if any objects were not present in the destination database.)

--create Create the database before restoring into it. If --clean is also specified, drop and recreate the target database before connecting to it.

Now having both together leads to this kind of sequence during your restore:

DROP DATABASE mydb;
...
CREATE DATABASE mydb WITH TEMPLATE = template0... [other options]
...
CREATE SCHEMA public;
...
CREATE TABLE...

There is no DROP for each individual object, only a DROP DATABASE at the beginning. If not using --create this would be the opposite.

Anyway this sequence raises the error of public schema already existing because creating mydb from template0 has imported it already (which is normal, it's the point of a template database).

I'm not sure why this case is not handled automatically by pg_restore. Maybe this would cause undesirable side-effects when an admin decides to customize template0 and/or change the purpose of public, even if we're not supposed to do that.