Document database socket usage or don't require encoded socket path

[nickdaugherty]

Past Issues Searched

• I have searched open and closed issues to make sure that the bug has not yet been reported

Issue is a Bug Report

• This is a bug report and not a feature request, nor asking for self-hosted support

Using official Plausible Cloud hosting or self-hosting?

Self-hosting

Describe the bug

When using database sockets, the DATABASE_URL must be formatted in a certain way that is not obvious without digging through the code, so should be documented somewhere.

Specifically, I worked out that the socket file part of the DATABASE_URL must be url-encoded, followed by an unencoded / then the database name. This is pretty confusing, so I'm opening this issue for future searchers and to hopefully get this documented or changed.

Example of correct socket string (the socket file path must be fully url encoded, including characters other than /, but the final / before the database name must not be):

postgres://plausible:password@%2Fpath%2Fto%Fsocket/database_name

Expected behavior

Expected that a non-url-encoded string would work:

postgres://plausible:password@/path/to/socket:file_name/database_name

Screenshots

No response

Environment

[apata]

Thanks for the well-formed report! I commend your desire to help others searching for the same thing. I've edited the Plausible CE wiki Configuration page to point to the expected url format at https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/Ecto.Repo.html#module-urls.

Interestingly, that doc doesn't actually mention what do with hostnames that contain forward slashes.

@nickdaugherty Do you mind contributing your findings to Ecto docs? https://github.com/elixir-ecto/ecto/blob/2bdbcb6a2c3022ae931ccb9c3e1920596a2da68a/lib/ecto/repo.ex#L81

When you do, we'll have the ideal flow in place: "Try to configure Plausible CE to work with a different DB connection" -> "Inspect Plausible CE wiki Configuration topic" -> "Read up on nuances of :url format in Ecto docs".

All the best with CE!