Postgres CLI tooling
The CLI section of awesome-postgres, all thirteen entries, as catalogued on 2026-08-20, at the catalog's word (T3).
The shell itself
| Entry | Catalogued as |
|---|---|
| psql | The built-in PostgreSQL CLI client |
| pgcli | Postgres CLI with autocompletion and syntax highlighting |
| sabiql | Fast TUI to browse, query and edit databases |
| squix | SQL client with query management |
| psql2csv | Run psql queries and output as CSV |
Schema as a declared artifact
| Entry | Catalogued as |
|---|---|
| atlas | Schema management and migration tool |
| pgschema | Terraform-style declarative schema migration |
| pg-schema-diff | Diff schemas and generate SQL migrations |
| MigrationPilot | Migration safety CLI detecting dangerous DDL |
| pgsh | Branch PostgreSQL databases like Git |
Five of thirteen entries in the "CLI" section are really about schema change, which is why that subject got its own page: see postgres-schema-migration. pgsh is the outlier — branching a database the way you branch code is the same idea turso and the serverless-Postgres vendors in postgres-managed-services sell as a headline feature, here as a local developer tool.
Documentation and visualisation
| Entry | Catalogued as |
|---|---|
| schemaspy | Generate HTML database documentation with ER diagrams |
| pdot | Visualize database structures in the shell |
| pgplan | Compare and analyze EXPLAIN plans |
pgplan belongs with pev2 and the rest of postgres-query-optimization-tooling; comparing two plans is the one operation that section's tools mostly don't do, and it is what you need when a plan flipped after a deploy.
Related
postgres-schema-migration · postgres-query-optimization-tooling · pev2 · turso · awesome-postgres · operational-databases