# pgAdmin 4 pgAdmin 4 is a rewrite of the popular pgAdmin3 management tool for the PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org) database. In the following documentation and examples, *$PGADMIN4_SRC/* is used to denote the top-level directory of a copy of the pgAdmin source tree, either from a tarball or a git checkout. ## Architecture pgAdmin 4 is written as a web application with Python(Flask) on the server side and ReactJS, HTML5 with CSS for the client side processing and UI. Although developed using web technologies, pgAdmin 4 can be deployed either on a web server using a browser, or standalone on a workstation. The runtime/ subdirectory contains an Electron based runtime application intended to allow this, which will execute the Python server and display the UI. ## Building the Runtime To build the runtime, the following packages must be installed: * NodeJS 16+ * Yarn Change into the runtime directory, and run *yarn install*. This will install the dependencies required. In order to use the runtime in a development environment, you'll need to copy *dev_config.json.in* file to *dev_config.json*, and edit the paths to the Python executable and *pgAdmin.py* file, otherwise the runtime will use the default paths it would expect to find in the standard package for your platform. You can then execute the runtime by running something like: ```bash yarn run start ``` # Configuring the Python Environment In order to run the Python code, a suitable runtime environment is required. Python version 3.7 and later are currently supported. It is recommended that a Python Virtual Environment is setup for this purpose, rather than using the system Python environment. On Linux and Mac systems, the process is fairly simple - adapt as required for your distribution: 1. Create a virtual environment in an appropriate directory. The last argument is the name of the environment; that can be changed as desired: ```bash $ python3 -m venv venv ``` 2. Now activate the virtual environment: ```bash $ source venv/bin/activate ``` 3. Some of the components used by pgAdmin require a very recent version of *pip*, so update that to the latest: ```bash $ pip install --upgrade pip ``` 4. Ensure that a PostgreSQL installation's bin/ directory is in the path (so pg_config can be found for building psycopg3), and install the required packages: ```bash (venv) $ PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/pgsql/bin pip install -r $PGADMIN4_SRC/requirements.txt ``` If you are planning to run the regression tests, you also need to install additional requirements from web/regression/requirements.txt: ```bash (venv) $ pip install -r $PGADMIN4_SRC/web/regression/requirements.txt ``` 5. Create a local configuration file for pgAdmin. Edit $PGADMIN4_SRC/web/config_local.py and add any desired configuration options (use the config.py file as a reference - any settings duplicated in config_local.py will override those in config.py). A typical development configuration may look like: ```python from config import * # Debug mode DEBUG = True # App mode SERVER_MODE = True # Enable the test module MODULE_BLACKLIST.remove('test') # Log CONSOLE_LOG_LEVEL = DEBUG FILE_LOG_LEVEL = DEBUG DEFAULT_SERVER = '127.0.0.1' UPGRADE_CHECK_ENABLED = True # Use a different config DB for each server mode. if SERVER_MODE == False: SQLITE_PATH = os.path.join( DATA_DIR, 'pgadmin4-desktop.db' ) else: SQLITE_PATH = os.path.join( DATA_DIR, 'pgadmin4-server.db' ) ``` This configuration allows easy switching between server and desktop modes for testing. 6. The initial setup of the configuration database is interactive in server mode, and non-interactive in desktop mode. You can run it either by running: ```bash (venv) $ python3 $PGADMIN4_SRC/web/setup.py ``` or by starting pgAdmin 4: ```bash (venv) $ python3 $PGADMIN4_SRC/web/pgAdmin4.py ``` Whilst it is possible to automatically run setup in desktop mode by running the runtime, that will not work in server mode as the runtime doesn't allow command line interaction with the setup program. At this point you will be able to run pgAdmin 4 from the command line in either server or desktop mode, and access it from a web browser using the URL shown in the terminal once pgAdmin has started up. Setup of an environment on Windows is somewhat more complicated unfortunately, please see *pkg/win32/README.txt* for complete details. # Building the Web Assets pgAdmin is dependent on a number of third party Javascript libraries. These, along with it's own Javascript code, SCSS/CSS code and images must be compiled into a "bundle" which is transferred to the browser for execution and rendering. This is far more efficient than simply requesting each asset as it's needed by the client. To create the bundle, you will need the 'yarn' package management tool to be installed. Then, you can run the following commands on a *nix system to download the required packages and build the bundle: ```bash (venv) $ cd $PGADMIN4_SRC (venv) $ make install-node (venv) $ make bundle ``` On Windows systems (where "make" is not available), the following commands can be used: ``` C:\> cd $PGADMIN4_SRC\web C:\$PGADMIN4_SRC\web> yarn install C:\$PGADMIN4_SRC\web> yarn run bundle ``` # Creating pgAdmin themes To create a pgAdmin theme, you need to create a directory under *web/pgadmin/static/scss/resources*. Copy the sample file *_theme.variables.scss.sample* to the new directory and rename it to *_theme.variables.scss*. Change the desired hexadecimal values of the colors and bundle pgAdmin. You can also add a preview image in the theme directory with the name as *\