Overview of repmgr commands. repmgr standby clone repmgr standby clone clones a PostgreSQL node from another PostgreSQL node, typically the primary, but optionally from any other node in the cluster or from Barman. It creates the recovery.conf file required to attach the cloned node to the primary node (or another standby, if cascading replication is in use). repmgr standby clone does not start the standby, and after cloning repmgr standby register must be executed to notify &repmgr; of its presence. Note that by default, all configuration files in the source node's data directory will be copied to the cloned node. Typically these will be postgresql.conf, postgresql.auto.conf, pg_hba.conf and pg_ident.conf. These may require modification before the standby is started. In some cases (e.g. on Debian or Ubuntu Linux installations), PostgreSQL's configuration files are located outside of the data directory and will not be copied by default. &repmgr; can copy these files, either to the same location on the standby server (provided appropriate directory and file permissions are available), or into the standby's data directory. This requires passwordless SSH access to the primary server. Add the option --copy-external-config-files to the repmgr standby clone command; by default files will be copied to the same path as on the upstream server. Note that the user executing repmgr must have write access to those directories. To have the configuration files placed in the standby's data directory, specify --copy-external-config-files=pgdata, but note that any include directives in the copied files may need to be updated. For reliable configuration file management we recommend using a configuration management tool such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet or Salt. When initially cloning a standby, you will need to ensure that all required WAL files remain available while the cloning is taking place. To ensure this happens when using the default `pg_basebackup` method, &repmgr; will set pg_basebackup's --xlog-method parameter to stream, which will ensure all WAL files generated during the cloning process are streamed in parallel with the main backup. Note that this requires two replication connections to be available (&repmgr; will verify sufficient connections are available before attempting to clone, and this can be checked before performing the clone using the --dry-run option). To override this behaviour, in repmgr.conf set pg_basebackup's --xlog-method parameter to fetch: pg_basebackup_options='--xlog-method=fetch' and ensure that wal_keep_segments is set to an appropriately high value. See the pg_basebackup documentation for details. From PostgreSQL 10, pg_basebackup's --xlog-method parameter has been renamed to --wal-method. repmgr standby register repmgr standby register adds a standby's information to the &repmgr; metadata. This command needs to be executed to enable promote/follow operations and to allow repmgrd to work with the node. An existing standby can be registered using this command. Execute with the --dry-run option to check what would happen without actually registering the standby. Depending on your environment and workload, it may take some time for the standby's node record to propagate from the primary to the standby. Some actions (such as starting repmgrd) require that the standby's node record is present and up-to-date to function correctly. By providing the option --wait-sync to the repmgr standby register command, &repmgr; will wait until the record is synchronised before exiting. An optional timeout (in seconds) can be added to this option (e.g. --wait-sync=60). Under some circumstances you may wish to register a standby which is not yet running; this can be the case when using provisioning tools to create a complex replication cluster. In this case, by using the -F/--force option and providing the connection parameters to the primary server, the standby can be registered. Similarly, with cascading replication it may be necessary to register a standby whose upstream node has not yet been registered - in this case, using -F/--force will result in the creation of an inactive placeholder record for the upstream node, which will however later need to be registered with the -F/--force option too. When used with repmgr standby register, care should be taken that use of the -F/--force option does not result in an incorrectly configured cluster.