PGFaker

Tool for dumping/exporting your postgres database's table data with custom masking rules.

Usage

pgfaker [options] <config>

Currently available options are

Options:
  -o --output <outFile>  STDOUT or name of the output sql file (default: "dump.sql")
  -v --verbose <mode> verbosity - verbose | info | silent
  -h, --help             display help for command

You can also use this with npx

$ npx pgfaker config.js --output=STDOUT

Options

• --output: Use it to either write to file or stdout.

  Examples:

  $ npx pgfaker config.js --output=STDOUT | psql database_url
  $ npx pgfaker config.js --output=dump.sql
  

  Defualt: dump.sql

• --verbose: This is used to control the verbosity level of logging from pgfaker

  • silent : No output at all, only runtime errors.
  • info: Basic information during the dump process such as current table, start and finish prompts etc.
  • verbose: All possible information during the dump process. This includes, everything from info plus columns that were skipped, transformed and more.

  Default: verbose

Configuration

The config.js (or any js file) will contain the configuration for masking the data.

export const configuration = {

  connectionUrl: "postgresql://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/DATABASE",

  columns: {
    columnName: (value) => /* do something */ return value
  },

  tables: {
    tableName: {
      columnName: (value) => /* do something */ return value
    }
  },

  options:{
    skip:{
      tableName: 'output' | 'mask'
    }
  }

  defaultTransformer: (value) => value,
};

Properties

• connectionUrl: The connection to your db

• columns: The columns to replace values of. If a column doesn't exist it is ignored (currently)

• tables: Use this to specify table specific column transformers. These transformers will take precedence over columns transformers.

  export const configuration = {
    connectionUrl: 'postgresql://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/DATABASE',
  
    columns: {
      description: (value) => 'This will not be used',
    },
  
    tables: {
      product: {
        description: (value) => 'This will be used',
      },
    },
  };

  For product table, description column will get This will be used, and all other tables having description column will get This will not be used

• defaultTransformer: if this is specified, then all of the columns not mentioned in the columns and tables will get this transformer. If this isn't specified, all of the undefined columns are left unchanged.

  You can go ahead and use something like faker or your own custom maskers for complex use cases.

• options: Additional options for the parser

  • skip: This property defines which table to either exclude from being masked or from being written to the output. This option accepts either 'mask' or 'output'

    • mask

      options: {
        skip: {
          blogs: 'mask';
        }
      }

      will make sure that the dumped sql doesn't have data masked for blogs table. This will override any other masking rules specified for this table.

    • output

      options: {
        skip: {
          users: 'output';
        }
      }

      will make sure that the dumped sql doesn't have any queries related to users table. This will override any other masking rules specified for this table.

Advanced

If you need more flexibility with masking, such as conditional masking then you can use middleware.

Middleware

Middleware in pgfaker allows you to access the record that is about to get transformed. You can modify the records here, or avoid the masking that is about to happen. The api looks like this

export const configuration = {
  connectionUrl: 'postgresql://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/DATABASE',

  columns: {
    description: (value) => 'This will not be used',
  },

  tables: {
    users: [checkIfAdmin, maskingRules],
  },
};

Where checkIfAdmin is your middleware function and maskingRules is your regular object of transformers

1. The checkIfAdmin function will receive the column values as first parameter and column names as the seconds

   const checkIfAdmin = (columnValues, columnNames) => {
     adminColumnIndex = columnNames.indexOf('admin');
     isAdmin = columnValues[adminColumnIndex];
   
     if (isAdmin === '1') {
       return null;
     }
     return columnValues;
   };

   Returning null (or any falsy value) from this function will result in any masking defined (read next point) for it to be avoided.

2. The maskingRules is your regular object of transformers. This can be used if you want to regular way of defining transformers along with the middleware. Note that the columns transformers are also used here

   const maskingRules = {
     users: {
       flag: (value) => 'off',
     },
   };

TroubleShooting

Please refer and raise the issues on github.

Why?

I was in search of a anonymizer for postgres and came across pg-anonymizer. This was not suitable for my requirement as it was lacking a flexible api and additional options, so I ended up creating my own version of anonymizer with inspiration from the package.