How to alter a column and change the default value?

If you want to add a default value for the already created column, this works for me:

ALTER TABLE Persons
ALTER credit SET DEFAULT 0.0;

ALTER TABLE foobar_data MODIFY COLUMN col VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '{}';

A second possibility which does the same (thanks to juergen_d):

ALTER TABLE foobar_data CHANGE COLUMN col col VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL DEFAULT '{}';

As a follow up, if you just want to set a default, pretty sure you can use the ALTER .. SET syntax. Just don't put all the other stuff in there. If you're gonna put the rest of the column definition in, use the MODIFY or CHANGE syntax as per the accepted answer.

Anyway, the ALTER syntax for setting a column default, (since that's what I was looking for when I came here):

ALTER TABLE table_name ALTER COLUMN column_name SET DEFAULT 'literal';

For which 'literal' could also be a number (e.g. ...SET DEFAULT 0). I haven't tried it with ...SET DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP but why not eh?