cli: passwords with special characters cannot be passed in URL

[joshimhoff]

Describe the problem

@vilterp @mberhault @nstewart

The managed console has a model that shows a cockroach command that lets the user connect securely to their cluster. Here is an example command, with a fake password:

cockroach sql --url 'postgres://josh:password>@aws-us-east-1.laughing-ladybug.cockroachlabs.cloud:26257/defaultdb?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=/Users/josh/Downloads/laughing-ladybug-ca.crt'

If your password has special characters in it (e.g. ">"), the cmd fails. I used a password manager to generate my password, and so it had five or so different special characters in it. The error message looks like this:

Error: invalid argument "postgres://josh:password>@aws-us-east-1.laughing-ladybug.cockroachlabs.cloud:26257/defaultdb?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=/Users/josh/Downloads/laughing-ladybug-ca.crt" for "--url" flag: parse postgres://josh:password>@aws-us-east-1.laughing-ladybug.cockroachlabs.cloud:26257/defaultdb?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=/Users/josh/Downloads/laughing-ladybug-ca.crt: net/url: invalid userinfo
Failed running "sql"

It works with psql tho:

psql 'postgres://josh:password>@aws-us-east-1.laughing-ladybug.cockroachlabs.cloud:26257/defaultdb?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=/Users/josh/Downloads/laughing-ladybug-ca.crt'

cockroach works if you don't put the password in the URL; cockroach then prompts you for a password and there seems to be no issue even with special characters.

On the managed side, we are gonna work around this issue by not including the password in the cockroach command we display to users. Perhaps we should fix the broader issue tho.

Nate found the following issue on stackoverflow:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48671938/go-url-parsestring-fails-with-certain-user-names-or-passwords

The issue looks relevant. Could we call url.QueryEscape()?

To Reproduce

Connect to cluster with cockroach command with special character such as ">" in password part of connection URL. e.g.:

cockroach sql --url 'postgres://josh:password>@aws-us-east-1.laughing-ladybug.cockroachlabs.cloud:26257/defaultdb?sslmode=verify-full&sslrootcert=/Users/josh/Downloads/laughing-ladybug-ca.crt'

Expected behavior

Ideally this would work without requiring user to escape the password. At the very least the error message could be clearer.

Environment:

$ cockroach version
Build Tag: v2.1.5
Build Time: 2019/02/19 16:35:28
Distribution: CCL
Platform: darwin amd64 (x86_64-apple-darwin18.2.0)
Go Version: go1.11.5
C Compiler: 4.2.1 Compatible Apple LLVM 10.0.0 (clang-1000.11.45.5)
Build SHA-1: 1634c6b
Build Type: release

[knz]

the issue for this is in the go URL parser. We can't just blindly call an unescape function; this would make the behavior break for folk who were using % in their passwords previously.

[u007]

i encounter similar issue, ive to url encode my password

[knz]

we also now support the password as a query argument at the end