The FreeBSD ports tree only has the old PgAdmin 3 desktop app available, there is no port for the web based 4.x series. It's very unfortunate that the PgAdmin developers chose to go this route. It seems that no one these days is capable of building an application without falling back to HTML and Javascript. It's just another example of the sad state of the technology ecosystem and developer skills. Anyway, lets install PgAdmin 4 on FreeBSD.

Requirements

This will be done on in a clean environment, but so long as you are running a modern version of FreeBSD (13.1 as of this writing), you should have no trouble.

• Testing on FreeBSD 13.1
• Tested with Python 3.9
• Internet Access

All these commands unless otherwise noted where executed as the root user.

Install Required Software

All the prerequisite software and libraries are available in the FreeBSD ports system. The process is not difficult, but requires several unique steps that would normally be handled by an installation script or package. Fortunately for us, FreeBSD makes it all extremely easy.

Virtual Environment

Use the FreeBSD package to install Python's virtual environment tooling. No need for Pipenv, we'll use the system's Python.

pkg install py39-virtualenv

For our installation we are using Python 3.9. Replace the version number above if you are using a later version.

Libraries

Since we are using virtual environment, none of the system Python libraries will be visible to PgAdmin. There are a few libraries that will need to be built from source. In order for that to be successful you'll need some header files and a Rust compiler.

pkg install jpeg-turbo postgresql13-client py39-sqlite3 rust

Replace the version of PostgreSQL and Python with the ones you are using.

Apache with mod_wsgi

Install and enable Apache and the wsgi module. Substitute the python and Apache versions accordingly.

pkg install apache24 ap24-py39-mod_wsgi
service apache24 enable
sed -i '' 's,#\(LoadModule wsgi_module.*$\),\1,g' /usr/local/etc/apache24/modules.d/270_mod_wsgi.conf

Install PgAdmin 4

Create the home, log, data directories, and a configuration file that will be used by PgAdmin and set the correct ownership and permissions.

install -d -o www -g www /usr/local/www/pgadmin4 /var/log/pgadmin4 /var/db/pgadmin4 /var/db/pgadmin4/sessions
install -d -o root -g www -m 750 /usr/local/etc/pgadmin4

Create and link to the configuration file named config_local.py.

cat << EOF >/usr/local/etc/pgadmin4/config_local.py
LOG_FILE = '/var/log/pgadmin4/pgadmin4.log'
SQLITE_PATH = '/var/db/pgadmin4/pgadmin4.db'
SESSION_DB_PATH = '/var/db/pgadmin4/sessions'
STORAGE_DIR = '/var/db/pgadmin4/storage'
AZURE_CREDENTIAL_CACHE_DIR = '/var/db/pgadmin4/azurecredentialcache'
KERBEROS_CCACHE_DIR = '/var/db/pgadmin4/kerberoscache'
EOF

Since this will be running as the same user as Apache, switch to the www user and set the home directory environmental variable.

su -m www -c /bin/sh
export HOME=/usr/local/www/pgadmin4

Create a new virtual environment for PgAdmin in your web server's file store.

cd /usr/local/www
virtualenv pgadmin4
cd ~

Activate the virtual environment.

. bin/activate

If using FreeBSD's csh, use the corresponding activation script.

source bin/activate.csh

Use pip install to automatically download and install PgAdmin 4 and all the dependencies. This could take a while

pip install pgadmin4

Link to the configuration created earlier config_local.py.

ln -s /usr/local/etc/pgadmin4/config_local.py /usr/local/www/pgadmin4/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pgadmin4/config_local.py

Create a link for "web" sub-directory to point to the application

ln -s /usr/local/www/pgadmin4/lib/python3.9/site-packages/pgadmin4 web

Run the following command to create the configuration database.

cd web
python setup.py
cd ~

When prompted enter an email address and password to be used for logging into the application.

NOTE: Configuring authentication for SERVER mode.

Enter the email address and password to use for the initial pgAdmin user account:

Email address: you@somwhere.tld
Password: 
Retype password:
pgAdmin 4 - Application Initialisation
======================================

You may exit and return to being root.

Setup Apache

We won't go into the details on how to get Apache properly setup. The remainder of this article assumes you already have a functional Virtual Hosting environment running. We'll create a new Apache VHost just for the purpose of running PgAdmin 4. The remaining steps should be executed as root

Before it will work, we need to make a minor tweak (as per official documentation) to the wsgi startup script.

edit /usr/local/www/pgadmin4/web/pgAdmin4.wsgi

Add the following line to the top of the file to activate the virtual environment when Apache serves the application. It's perfectly fine to put it all the way at the top before the comments or directly after the comments. The only requirement is that it must run before any other Python code gets executed.

activate_this = '/usr/local/www/pgadmin4/bin/activate_this.py'
exec(open(activate_this).read())

I have a hostname "pgadmin" setup that points to my server's IP address. Consult your DNS server documentation on how to create a hostname.

# host pgadmin
pgadmin.myserver.dev is an alias for server.myserver.dev.
server.myserver.dev has address 192.168.1.254

I keep the directives for each site in individual files and have Apache load them from a directory called "Sites". If you wish to do the same create a file in the Apache Includes directory that contains a directive to load conf files from a Sites directory as shown below.

mkdir /usr/local/etc/apache24/Sites
cat << EOF >/usr/local/etc/apache24/Includes/sites.conf 
Include etc/apache24/Sites/*.conf
EOF

Create a new vhost in Apache using the one site per config layout. Create a file in the Sites directory. Replace the ServerName and ServerAlias directives as needed.

cat << EOF >/usr/local/etc/apache24/Sites/pgadmin4.conf
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName pgadmin
    ServerAlias pgadmin.*    

    WSGIDaemonProcess pgadmin processes=1 threads=25 python-home=/usr/local/www/pgadmin4
    WSGIScriptAlias / /usr/local/www/pgadmin4/web/pgAdmin4.wsgi

    <Directory /usr/local/www/pgadmin4/web>
        WSGIProcessGroup pgadmin
        WSGIApplicationGroup %{GLOBAL}
        Require all granted
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>
EOF

Now start up Apache.

service apache24 start

Log in

Open your browser and navigate to the hostname you setup for the vHost. Log in with the username and password you setup earlier.