pgAdmin is the most popular and feature-rich Open Source administration and development platform for PostgreSQL, the most advanced Open Source database in the world.

Add pgadmin4 Repository

To add the repository find out the release of the Linux distribution by using

lsb_release -cs

Create a file /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list and add the following line to add the repository

deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt/ xenial-pgdg main

Import the repository signing key, and update the package lists

wget --quiet -O - https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo apt-key add -

sudo apt-get update

Now install pgadmin4

sudo apt-get install pgadmin4

Configure pgadmin4

To find out where is the files for pgadmin4 web portal are located run

whereis pgadmin4

This should give you the path to the pgadmin4, usually, it is located at /usr/share/pgadmin4/, in this path, there should be a directory called web. So in /usr/share/pgadmin4/web there is a file called config.py. This file holds the default configurations. Create another file called config_local.py and add the following lines

LOG_FILE = '/var/log/pgadmin4/pgadmin4.log'
SQLITE_PATH = '/var/lib/pgadmin4/pgadmin4.db'
SESSION_DB_PATH = '/var/lib/pgadmin4/sessions'
STORAGE_DIR = '/var/lib/pgadmin4/storage'

Make sure that the file permission to the above-mentioned directories is appropriate. The directories specified are writeable by the user that the web server processes will be running as, e.g. apache or www-data

Now, create the appropriate directories by using the following commands

sudo mkdir -p /var/lib/pgadmin4/{sessions,storage}

sudo mkdir -p /var/log/pgadmin4/

To change the directory permissions, use the following commands

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/lib/pgadmin4/

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/log/pgadmin4/

To change the ownership of the configuration database to the user that the webserver processes will run as, for example, assuming that the webserver runs as www-data user in group www-data, and that the SQLite path is /var/lib/pgadmin4/pgadmin4.db, use the following command

sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/lib/pgadmin4/pgadmin4.db

Run the following command to create the configuration database

sudo python3 setup.py

This will create the configuration database and ask for the admin username (email) and password to be set for the initial login.

pgadmin4 as a Service

To create a service form recently installed pgadmin4, we need to install a couple of software tools to help us manage the service. The first software we are going to install is a wsgi proxy server named gunicorn and to manage and supervise services supervisor will be used.

Install gUnicorn

Installing gunicorn is fairly simple. gunicorn is a python based package so it can be installed with python’s package manager pip. In this example, we are using python3. To install gunicorn run the following – (use sudo -H to make gunicorn available systemwide for all users)

sudo -H python3 -m pip install gunicorn

Now let’s take a note where gunicorn has been installed so that we can use this later in the process. To do that, a simple command like below will do

whereis gunicorn

This should spit out the installation location for gunicorn. The output should look something like this

gunicorn: /usr/local/bin/gunicorn

Install Supervisor

Supervisor can be installed through apt package manager. To install supervisor use the following command

sudo apt-get install supervisor

Once installed successfully, the configurations for supervisor will be available generally in /etc/supervisor/supervisord.conf and the program configurations that are managed by it will be available in /etc/supervisor/conf.d/ directory. We will come back here later in the process.

Creating gUnicorn Configuration

To use the available feature of a wsgi server like gunicorn we need a configuration file. The location of this configuration file can be set anywhere in the system but I prefer to keep it inside pgadmin4 directory so that it’s attached to pgadmin4. So create a file named gunicorn_config.py in /usr/share/pgadmin4/web and add the following content

command = '/usr/local/bin/gunicorn'
pythonpath = '/usr/share/pgadmin4/web/'
bind = '127.0.0.1:5050'
workers = 1
threads = 25
user = 'www-data'
group = 'www-data'

In command = section, use the path of gunicorn retrieved in the previous step with whereis command

Save the file and move to the next step.

Creating Supervisor Program Configuration

Let’s head back to /etc/supervisor/conf.d and create a file named pgadmin4.conf with following content

[program:pgadmin4]
command = /usr/local/bin/gunicorn -c /usr/share/pgadmin4/web/gunicorn_config.py pgAdmin4:app
directory = /usr/share/pgadmin4/web/
user = www-data

Now, we are ready to start the service

Start pgadmin4 Service

To start pgadmin4 as a service with supervisor use the following command

sudo supervisorctl start pgadmin4

To check the current status of pgadmin4 use status command

sudo supervisorctl status pgadmin4

This should give you an output similar as below

pgadmin4                          RUNNING   pid 1519, uptime 0:18:55

supervisorctl also, responds to commands like stop and restart to stop and restart services. Now we are ready to use the pgadmin4 web application. So how can we log in? Where is the web application?

Browse

Open an web browser and go to – http://127.0.0.1:5050

Enjoy!