Users

Mathesar allows multiple users to collaborate on the same data using a role-based permissioning system.

Managing Users

1. Click on the gear icon on the top right of the application and select Administration.
2. In the left sidebar, click on Users.

Admin-assigned passwords

Any user with an admin-assigned password (new or edited) will be prompted to change their password after logging in.

Admin vs Standard users

Each Mathesar user is either Admin or Standard.

Admin users have the following capabilities which Standard users do not:

• Admins can can manage other Mathesar users (view, add, edit, delete).
• Admins can add and remove Databases.
• Admins can manage Collaborators. This allows an Admin user to grant any Mathesar user access to a database through a PostgreSQL role that the Admin specifies.

Upon installing Mathesar, your first user will be an Admin user.

Users vs Roles

• A “user” is a Mathesar construct. Each Mathesar installation has multiple users.
• A “role” is a PostgreSQL construct (docs). Each PostgreSQL server has multiple roles and multiple databases.

Why this distinction is important

Outside of Mathesar, it’s not uncommon for people to say user when referring to a PostgreSQL role. However, within the context of Mathesar users and roles are different things! Our documentation maintains this distinction pedantically.

How users and roles work together:

• To access a database, each Mathesar user must be assigned a PostgreSQL role to be used for that database.

• The user’s permissions on actual data (in the user database) are determined by the corresponding role’s permissions within PostgreSQL.

  Admin doesn’t matter here

  The user’s “admin” status with Mathesar has no effect on the user’s ability to do things with the data in a database! The admin status only affects operations on Mathesar’s internal database such as managing collaborators and their corresponding roles.

• You can configure separate Mathesar users to share the same PostgreSQL role if you like. This is a good option if you want those users to have the same permissions on the data.

• Or you can use separate PostgreSQL roles for different users. This is necessary any time you want different users to have different permissions on the data.
• You cannot configure one Mathesar user with two PostgreSQL role simultaneously — though you can save multiple PostgreSQL roles in Mathesar and manually switch between them if necessary.

See Permissions for more information on managing roles.

Limitations

• Mathesar does not send invitation emails to new users (yet). You’ll need to send the user their username and password yourself.
• Nor is there yet an email-based password recovery mechanism. If you are locked out of your Mathesar installation’s web interface, your system administrator can still use the command line reset any user’s password.