Neon Postgres Source Setup Guide

This is a guide on how to create a Neon PostgreSQL peer which you can use for replication in PeerDB. Make sure you’re signed in to your Neon console for this setup.

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Creating a user with permissions

Let’s create a new user for PeerDB with the necessary permissions suitable for CDC, and also create a publication that we’ll use for replication.

For this, you can head over to the SQL Console tab. Here, we can run the following SQL commands:

  CREATE USER peerdb_user PASSWORD 'peerdb_password';
  GRANT USAGE ON SCHEMA "public" TO peerdb_user;
  GRANT SELECT ON ALL TABLES IN SCHEMA "public" TO peerdb_user;
  ALTER DEFAULT PRIVILEGES IN SCHEMA "public" GRANT SELECT ON TABLES TO peerdb_user;

-- Give replication permission to the USER
  ALTER USER peerdb_user REPLICATION;

-- Create a publication. We will use this when creating the mirror
  CREATE PUBLICATION peerdb_publication FOR ALL TABLES;

User and publication commands

Click on Run to have a publication and a user ready.

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Enable Logical Replication

In Neon, you can enable logical replication through the UI. This is necessary for PeerDB’s CDC to replicate data. Head over to the Settings tab and then to the Logical Replication section.

Enable logical replication

Click on Enable to be all set here. You should see the below success message once you enable it.

Logical replication enabled

Let’s verify the below settings in your Neon Postgres instance:

SHOW wal_level; -- should be logical
SHOW max_wal_senders; -- should be 10
SHOW max_replication_slots; -- should be 10

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IP Whitelisting (For Neon Enterprise plan)

If you have Neon Enterprise plan, you can whitelist the PeerDB Cloud IP addresses (or the equivalent for PeerDB OSS/Enterprise) to allow replication from PeerDB Cloud to your Neon Postgres instance. To do this you can click on the Settings tab and go to the IP Allow section.

Allow IPs screen

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Copy Connection Details

Now that we have the user, publication ready and replication enabled, we can copy the connection details to create a Neon Postgres peer in PeerDB. Head over to the Dashboard and at the text box where it shows the connection string, change the view to Parameters Only. We will need these parameters for our next step.

Allow IPs screen

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Create Neon Postgres Peer in PeerDB UI

Now that we have the connection details, we can create a Neon Postgres peer in PeerDB. Head over to the PeerDB UI and click on Create Peer. Select Neon as the source.

Select Neon peer

Fill in the Neon connection details that we copied earlier in the following form.

Create the Postgres peer

Click on Validate and once that’s green, you can go ahead and click on Create to create the peer!