PGWEB_SSL_DISABLE option

[CharlesLLM]

I am encountering some issues with Docker Compose and the image.

I just put this in my compose.yaml file:

 pgweb:
    image: sosedoff/pgweb
    restart: always
    depends_on:
      db:
        condition: service_healthy
    ports:
      - 8081:8081
    environment:
      PGWEB_DATABASE_URL: ${DATABASE_URL}

And I keep having this error

Pgweb v0.17.0 (git: 6b0b0244) (go: go1.24.6) (build time: 2025-11-22T15:32:28Z) (arch: linux/amd64)
Connecting to server...
Error: pq: SSL is not enabled on the server

Would it be possible to add an env variable to disable SSL (PGWEB_SSL_DISABLE) ?
Because for example I use Prisma, so I can't pass both schema and sslmode options in my database url

[sosedoff]

Why cant you pass both options?

[CharlesLLM]

Because I already tried, and when I passed both options Prisma raises an error like "Prisma doesn't recognize the 'sslmode' option."
Maybe it is a very specific issue, but I guess it would be nice to just pass this as a compose env variable to avoid editing the DATABASE_URL directly.

P.S. I looked at prisma studio, now I'm using it but if the problem has never been found somewhere else, the conclusion may be "Use prisma studio" 🤷

[sosedoff]

That's so odd that Prisma Studio does not support sslmode parameter, since its an official one and has been around for ages: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/libpq-ssl.html.

[sosedoff]

Claude helped to understand why its not supporting it since i've never used it:

Prisma doesn't fully support this parameter because:

  1. Prisma uses its own connection handling — rather than passing the connection string directly to libpq, Prisma's query engine (written in Rust, using libraries
  like native-tls or rustls) handles TLS itself. It doesn't map 1:1 to libpq's sslmode semantics.
  2. Prisma uses sslaccept instead — Prisma introduced its own parameter sslaccept=strict or sslaccept=accept_invalid_certs as a simpler toggle, rather than
  supporting the full libpq spectrum.
  3. Limited SSL configuration — In the Prisma datasource block, SSL is typically controlled via:
  datasource db {
    provider = "postgresql"
    url      = "postgresql://...?sslmode=require&sslcert=...&sslkey=...&sslrootcert=..."
  }
  3. But not all combinations work as expected. sslmode=require is generally supported, but verify-ca and verify-full have historically been problematic.
  4. Prisma Studio specifically has additional limitations because it runs its own lightweight query engine instance, which may handle SSL parameters differently from
   the main Prisma Client.