pgAdmin3 (community fork)

An actively-maintained fork of pgAdmin III, the classic native desktop administration tool for PostgreSQL. The official pgAdmin III project was retired in favor of the web-based pgAdmin 4, but this fork keeps the native wxWidgets application alive: fixing bugs against modern PostgreSQL versions and adding a substantial number of features power users have asked for over the years (see CHANGELOG.md for the full history).

Upstream (unmaintained) project: https://github.com/postgres/pgadmin3

What this fork adds over stock pgAdmin III

A few highlights out of many — see CHANGELOG.md for the complete, dated list:

• Query tool: auto-select the statement under the cursor, autosave tab contents, named/auto-loading bookmarks, multiple result-output windows, multi-column result sorting, variable substitution ($1, :name), PCRE-based text transformation dialog, word-hint autocomplete, join autocompletion via foreign keys, human-readable big numbers, and a "compare 2 cells" diff view.
• Context help: hypertext popup help for database objects with clickable navigation between functions, tables, and triggers.
• Server Status / Activity window: process highlighting, wait-event sampling (pg_wait_sampling), AWR-style reports, and a CSV log viewer with per-column filters and log-line grouping.
• Schema tooling: cross-server object comparison with HTML diff reports, GitLab-backed schema version control, B-tree index checking via amcheck, pgpro_scheduler job status integration.
• UI: SVG toolbar icons, per-server icon coloring, JSON-tree editor for the app's own settings file, HiDPI-aware builds.
• Platform support: native Windows, Linux, and macOS builds (Apple Silicon, Cocoa) — see below.
• Internationalization: full UI translations in 45 languages, all with editable .po sources.

Supported platforms

Platform	Status	Build
Windows	Primary target, prebuilt .exe in Release/	Visual Studio project (pgAdmin3.vcxproj) or mingw cross-compile — see INSTALL_EN.txt
Linux	Actively maintained	make build (CMake under the hood) — see INSTALL_EN.txt
macOS	Stable, community-maintained	make build — see below and AGENTS.md

Requires PostgreSQL client libraries; the app itself connects to PostgreSQL 12+ and PostgresPro Enterprise, with incremental support added for newer server versions (13/15/16) as they've been released.

Building

This repo has a small Makefile wrapper around CMake that picks the right flow for your OS:

make            # show build help for your detected OS
make build      # configure + build (macOS: also assembles a .app bundle)
make run        # quick dev run (no packaging)
make clean      # remove build output

macOS

Pre-built binary via Homebrew Cask (Apple Silicon, arm64):

brew install heptau/tap/pgadmin3

Or build from source:

make build
open "build-macos/pgAdmin III.app"

The first from-source build needs a locally-built wxWidgets (Homebrew's bottle isn't compatible out of the box — see AGENTS.md for why and how to build one). Once that's in place, make build configures CMake, compiles, and assembles a real double-clickable .app bundle with its own icon and bundled libraries — no DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH needed at runtime.

Linux

make build
./build/pgAdmin3

Needs wxWidgets 3.2+, libxml2, libxslt, and PostgreSQL client/server dev headers. See INSTALL_EN.txt for exact package names and the mingw cross-compile recipe for producing a Windows build from Linux.

Windows

Open pgAdmin3.vcxproj in Visual Studio, or cross-compile from Linux with mingw — see INSTALL_EN.txt.

A pre-built portable zip is also published on every GitHub release (pgAdmin3-<version>-windows-x64.zip) — no build tools needed, just unzip and run pgAdmin3.exe. It's assembled by make build-win / windows/package_release.sh from the x64/Release/ build already tracked in this repo, with guru hint docs and extra wxstd.mo translations layered in (see i18n/wx-stock/README.md).

Note: the pgAdmin3.exe/DLLs in x64/Release/ come from this project's master branch, which tracks the original author's fork (levinsv/pgadmin3, configured here as the upstream remote) — so this zip reflects that build, not necessarily every fix or feature that's landed in this fork's main branch or macOS build. It does, however, include the extra languages and hint documentation curated in this project.

Repository layout

The source tree mirrors pgAdmin III's original module split: frm/ (top-level windows), dlg/ (property dialogs), ctl/ (custom controls), schema/ (database object model), gqb/ (graphical query builder), debugger/ (PL/pgSQL debugger), pgscript/ (scripting engine), slony/ and agent/ (Slony-I / pgAgent integrations), ogl/hotdraw (the ERD canvas toolkit), and utils/ (shared helpers).

Contributing / project notes

• CHANGELOG.md — full dated history of changes.
• AGENTS.md — working notes for the macOS port: how the local wxWidgets build is set up, known platform-specific gotchas, and the branching approach used to keep macOS-only changes easy to rebase against upstream.
• INSTALL.txt / INSTALL_EN.txt — detailed Linux/Windows build instructions (Russian/English).

License

Released under the PostgreSQL Licence, same as the original pgAdmin III project.