pgadmin4/pkg/win32

pgAdmin Windows Builds

These notes describe how to setup a Windows development/build environment for pgAdmin. Only 64 bit builds are supported from v4.30 onwards, however 32 bit builds may still work with suitable adjustments.

Installing build requirements

1. Install Chocolatey from https://chocolatey.org/install#individual

2. Install Visual Studio:

    choco install visualstudio2022community --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.ATLMFC;includeRecommended --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Workload.NativeDesktop;includeRecommended --add Microsoft.VisualStudio.Component.VC.CMake.Project;includeRecommended
   

3. Install the command line tools the build uses:

    choco install -y git innosetup nodejs-lts python syft wget yarn
   

   That is the whole list for building pgAdmin. The build calls yarn, node, npm, wget for the Electron download, syft for the SBOM, ISCC from Inno Setup, and signtool if you are signing; git is used indirectly, the bundle step recording the commit hash. curl and tar are used too, but Windows has shipped both since 1803, so they need no installing.

   Python is here for a development environment only. Building an installer does not need one, because Make.bat downloads the version named in pkg/python-version.txt into the build tree.

   If you intend to build the dependencies from source, rather than taking them from pgbuild as described below, you will also want the toolchain that needs, and the GnuWin32 binaries and HTML Help Workshop on the system path:

    choco install -y awk bzip2 cmake diffutils dotnet3.5 gnuwin32-coreutils.install gzip html-help-workshop meson ninja sed strawberryperl winflexbison3
   

   • C:\Program Files (x86)\GnuWin32\bin
   • C:\Program Files (x86)\HTML Help Workshop

4. Upgrade pip:

    python -m pip install --upgrade pip
   

5. Install virtualenv:

    pip install virtualenv
   

Getting the dependencies

Download a pre-built set of dependencies from the pgbuild project, which is what the release builds use. Building them from source is possible but not documented here: PostgreSQL 17 and later use Meson and pkg-config, which takes a fair amount of setting up, and doing it by hand gets you binaries built against different libraries from the ones we ship. Each dependency is published as a release whose tag ends in -latest, so the current build is always at a predictable URL rather than buried in a workflow run:

https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgbuild/releases/download/postgresql-18-windows-x86_64-latest/postgresql-18-windows-x86_64-latest.zip
https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgbuild/releases/download/krb5-windows-x86_64-latest/krb5-windows-x86_64-latest.zip

Extract both into the same directory, such as C:\Build64; they unpack into postgresql and krb5 subdirectories. Kerberos is a separate download because the PostgreSQL build doesn't include gssapi support, using native SSPI instead.

The build checks in .github/workflows fetch exactly these, through the install-pgbuild-deps action, so a local build and a CI build are working from the same binaries.

Setting up a dev environment

This section describes the steps to setup and run pgAdmin for the first time in a development environment. You do not need to complete this section if you just want to build an installer.

1. Check out the source code:

    git clone https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgadmin4.git
   

2. Install and build the JS dependencies:

    cd pgadmin4\web
    yarn install
    yarn run bundle
   

3. Create a virtual env:

    cd pgadmin4
    python -m venv venv
    pip install -r web\regression\requirements.txt
    pip install sphinx
    pip install sphinxcontrib-youtube
   

You should now be able to run the pgAdmin Python application, or build the desktop runtime.

Building an installer

1. Set the required environment variables, either system-wide, or in a Visual Studio 2022 64bit command prompt. The values below are examples rather than defaults, so check them against where you unpacked the dependencies:

    SET "PGADMIN_POSTGRES_DIR=C:\build64\postgresql"
    SET "PGADMIN_KRB5_DIR=C:\build64\krb5"
    SET "PGADMIN_INNOTOOL_DIR=C:\Program Files (x86)\Inno Setup 6"
    SET "PGADMIN_SIGNTOOL_DIR=C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\bin\10.0.22621.0\x64"
    SET "PGADMIN_VCREDIST_DIR=C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio\2022\Community\VC\Redist\MSVC\14.40.33807"
    SET "PGADMIN_VCREDIST_FILE=vc_redist.x64.exe"
   

   Note that Python is not among them. Make.bat downloads the exact version named in pkg/python-version.txt into the build tree, both to build the virtual environment with and to ship, so no Python needs to be installed for the installer build and the one on the PATH is not consulted.

2. Run:

    make
   

   If you have a code signing certificate, this will automatically be used if found in the Windows Certificate Store to sign the installer. Signing is enabled by setting PGADMIN_WINDOWS_CSC to the certificate's subject name; without it the build produces an unsigned installer.

   See SIGNING.md for how the release signing host is set up, including the Certum hardware token, the certificate-to-key repair that its "simple" registration does not do correctly, and why the build agent must run in an interactive session rather than as a Windows service.

3. Find the completed installer in the dist/ subdirectory of your source tree.