I am using postgresql locally, and never had this problem. My version is (PostgreSQL) 9.3.12, Ubuntu.

Do you get any error message? Check the error log, and please enable debug=2 in application/config/config.php.

No error message.

The code that's failing is in Authdb.php:

if ($sStoredPassword !== hash('sha256', $password))

Adding some debug code above that:

die('password: ' . CVarDumper::dumpAsString($password) . ' hash(password): ' . CVarDumper::dumpAsString(hash('sha256', $password)) . ' sStoredPassword: ' . CVarDumper::dumpAsString($sStoredPassword));

The output I get is:

password: 'password'
hash(password): '5e884898da28047151d0e56f8dc6292773603d0d6aabbdd62a11ef721d1542d8'
sStoredPassword: 'x35653838343839386461323830343731353164306535366638646336323932373733363033643064366161626264643632613131656637323164313534326438'

The contents of the database:

I'll also attach the contents of phpinfo().

Perhaps it's because php's postgres drivers are compiled against 8.4 libraries?

FYI, I've tried versions 9.5.2, 9.4.7, 9.3.12 and 9.3.9 of postgres.

How did you install? Did you update from a previous version or is it a clean install?

\x35653838343839386461323830343731353164306535366638646336323932373733363033643064366161626264643632613131656637323164313534326438 is the hexadecimal representation of 5e884898da28047151d0e56f8dc6292773603d0d6aabbdd62a11ef721d1542d8 so it is stored alright.

You probably need to run

ALTER DATABASE <your_limeSurvey_db> SET bytea_output='escape';

on your database.

@olle It was a clean install.

@c_schmitz that worked. Thanks!

Is this something that the installer should do?

The installer does it - probably it had no permission to execute it?

I connected to the database on the command line using the same username and password that limesurvey's installer used.

The database already existed in postgres, so the install just created the tables. Will the installer still alter the database if it already exists?

I checked and I can see now that we dropped this statement some time ago because it was not needed anymore and was causing other issues.

I just test-installed on a Postgres 9.4 and and 9.5.3 it works fine without that setting.

I really think the problem is that your PHP's postgres drivers are compiled against 8.4 libraries.

After consideration this is a no-fix as we only support Postgres 9.x and up (with related drivers :-) )

(Postgres 8 is out of support for two years now and it should not be hard to update the PDO driver libraries.