How do I remove the default user? - ClickHouse Documentation

Removing the default user

This guide is not applicable to ClickHouse Cloud.

In this guide, we’re going to learn how to remove the default user from ClickHouse Server. We can do this by creating a YAML file (let’s call it remove_default_user.yaml) that has the following content

users:
  default:
    "@remove": remove

The location of this file depends on how we have ClickHouse installed.

Running the executable directly

If we’re running the ClickHouse directly (clickhouse server), we need to put the file under the config.d directory. When we run ClickHouse Server:

clickhouse server

We’ll see the following line in the logs:

{} <Debug> ConfigProcessor: Merging configuration file 'config.d/remove_default_user.yaml'.

And we’ll be unable to connect using clickhouse client:

ClickHouse client version 24.11.1.2557 (official build).
Connecting to localhost:9000 as user default.
Password for user (default):
Connecting to localhost:9000 as user default.
Code: 516. DB::Exception: Received from localhost:9000. DB::Exception: default: Authentication failed: password is incorrect, or there is no user with such name.

Docker or installed

If we’re running ClickHouse via Docker or have it installed on our machine, we need to put the file under the /etc/clickhouse-server/users.d directory instead. So if we’re running with Docker, we can mount the config.d directory that we created earlier to /etc/clickhouse-server/users.d:

docker run \
  -v ./config.d:/etc/clickhouse-server/users.d \
  -p 8123:8123 -p9000:9000 \
  clickhouse/clickhouse-server:24.12

Merging configuration file '/etc/clickhouse-server/config.d/docker_related_config.xml'.
Logging trace to /var/log/clickhouse-server/clickhouse-server.log
Logging errors to /var/log/clickhouse-server/clickhouse-server.err.log

We can then search the server logs to check that it gets picked up:

docker ps --format "table {{.ID}}\t{{.Image}}\t{{.Names}}\t{{.Command}}"

CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                                NAMES               COMMAND
383e8ed89431   clickhouse/clickhouse-server:24.12   trusting_rosalind   "/entrypoint.sh"

docker exec -it trusting_rosalind grep "users\.d" /var/log/clickhouse-server/clickhouse-server.log

We should see the following line:

{} <Debug> ConfigProcessor: Merging configuration file '/etc/clickhouse-server/users.d/remove_default_user.yaml'.

​Removing the default user

​Running the executable directly

​Docker or installed

Removing the default user

Running the executable directly

Docker or installed