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 fork a Python server process and display the UI.

Prerequisites

1. Install Node.js 20 and above (https://nodejs.org/en/download)
2. yarn (https://yarnpkg.com/getting-started/install)
3. Python 3.9 and above (https://www.python.org/downloads/)
4. PostgreSQL server (https://www.postgresql.org/download)

Start by enabling Corepack, if it isn't already; this will add the yarn binary to your PATH:

corepack enable

Building the Web Assets

pgAdmin is dependent on a number of third-party JavaScript libraries. These, along with its own JavaScript code, 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 is 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:

$ cd $PGADMIN4_SRC
$ make install-node
$ 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

Configuring the Python Environment

In order to run the Python code, a suitable runtime environment is required. Python version 3.9 and later are currently supported. It is recommended that a Python virtual environment is set up 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:

   $ python3 -m venv venv
   

2. Now activate the virtual environment:

   $ 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:

   (venv) $ 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:

   (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:

   (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:

   import os
   import logging
   
   # Change pgAdmin data directory
   DATA_DIR = '/Users/myuser/.pgadmin_dev'
   
   # Change pgAdmin server and port
   DEFAULT_SERVER = '127.0.0.1'
   DEFAULT_SERVER_PORT = 5051
   
   # Switch between server and desktop mode
   SERVER_MODE = True
   
   # Change pgAdmin config DB path in case an external DB is used.
   CONFIG_DATABASE_URI="postgresql://postgres:postgres@localhost:5436/pgadmin"
   
   # Set up SMTP
   MAIL_SERVER = 'smtp.gmail.com'
   MAIL_PORT = 465
   MAIL_USE_SSL = True
   MAIL_USERNAME = 'user@gmail.com'
   MAIL_PASSWORD = 'xxxxxxxxxx'
   
   # Change log level
   CONSOLE_LOG_LEVEL = logging.INFO
   FILE_LOG_LEVEL = logging.INFO
   
   # 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:

   (venv) $ python3 $PGADMIN4_SRC/web/setup.py
   

   or by starting pgAdmin 4:

   (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.md for complete details.

Building the documentation

In order to build the docs, an additional Python package is required in the virtual environment. This can be installed with the pip package manager:

$ source venv/bin/activate
(venv) $ pip install Sphinx
(venv) $ pip install sphinxcontrib-youtube

The docs can then be built using the Makefile in $PGADMIN4_SRC, e.g.

(venv) $ make docs

The output can be found in $PGADMIN4_SRC/docs/en_US/_build/html/index.html

Building the Runtime

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:

yarn run start

Building packages

Most packages can be built using the Makefile in $PGADMIN4_SRC, provided all the setup and configuration above has been completed.

To build a source tarball:

(venv) $ make src

To build a PIP Wheel, activate either a Python 3 virtual environment, configured with all the required packages, and then run:

(venv) $ make pip

To build the macOS AppBundle, please see pkg/mac/README.md.

To build the Windows installer, please see pkg/win32/README.md.

Create Database Migrations

In order to make changes to the SQLite DB, navigate to the 'web' directory:

(venv) $ cd $PGADMIN4_SRC/web

Create a migration file with the following command:

(venv) $ FLASK_APP=pgAdmin4.py flask db revision

This will create a file in: $PGADMIN4_SRC/web/migrations/versions/ . Add any changes to the 'upgrade' function. Increment the SCHEMA_VERSION in $PGADMIN4_SRC/web/pgadmin/model/__init__.py file.

There is no need to increment the SETTINGS_SCHEMA_VERSION.

Support

See https://www.pgadmin.org/support/ for support options.

Security Issues

If you would like to report a security issue with pgAdmin, please email security (at) pgadmin (dot) org.

Note that this address should only be used for reporting security issues that you believe you've found in the design or code of pgAdmin, pgAgent, and the pgAdmin website. It should not be used to ask security questions.

Project info

A GitHub project for pgAdmin 4 can be found at the address below:

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

Please submit any changes as Pull Requests against the master branch of the pgadmin-org/pgadmin4 repository.

If you wish to discuss pgAdmin 4, or contribute to the project, please use the pgAdmin Hackers mailing list:

pgadmin-hackers@postgresql.org