Dear PgAdmin4 maintainers,
I wanted to install PgAdmin4 on my Fedora 24 system. I want to use it
in standalone mode, as a desktop application, essentially as a
replacement for PgAdmin3.
I've already installed the PGDG 9.6 repository RPM because I've
upgraded to Postgresql 9.6, and I've thought that the pgadmin4 RPMs
from that repo would work. Unfortunately the documentation on the
official site (https://www.pgadmin.org/download/linux4.php) merely
pointed me to this repository but didn't tell which packages I need.
I installed all that seemed relevant
(pgadmin4.x86_64, pgadmin4-web.noarch, pgadmin4-docs.noarch)
However, these packages seem half-finished at best, as I've encountered
several problems.
- No "pgadmin4" or similar binary was placed in any directory in $PATH.
- Looking at the contents of the packages, I've found a binary
at /usr/pgadmin4-1.0/runtime/pgAdmin4, however, trying to run this
manually results in a Fatal Error dialog box that says "Failed to
locate pgAdmin4.py, terminating server thread", then (sometimes) a
segfault.
- From the output of strace it turned out that this binary looks for
this pgAdmin4.py at / and /usr/pgadmin4-1.0/runtime, but not at the
correct /usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages/pgadmin4-web, even though
there is an ini file next to the binary, containing this location. (The
ini file is never accessed, though).
- The .desktop file supplied by the package is corrupt. It contains
Exec==/usr/bin/python3 /usr/lib/python3.5/site-packages/pgadmin4-
web/pgAdmin4.py
instead of Exec=...
After fixing this error by hand, the icon appears in the system's
Application menu, but it doesn't appear to start anything. In any case,
shouldn't it execute the runtime binary instead of the web server?
- So I've tried to run the command in the above Exec line manually.
It printed an error message about config_local.py missing and exited.
So I've tried creating a config_local.py by copying config_distro.py.
(https://www.pgadmin.org/docs4/1.x/desktop_deployment.html mentions
this file, but with a notice that the steps described there shouldn't
be necessary for normal users.)
After that it appeared to run, instructing me to point my browser at
localhost:5050, at which location I was greeted by the shiny new
interface.
So at this point I have a desktop application that doesn't work and a
half-baked way to start the interface in the browser, which I don't
want to do. And none of the workarounds described above should be
necessary anyway: I would've expected that after installing the RPM I'd
have an application that works out of the box.
best regards,
Peter Juhasz