This is a quick walkthrough of how I installed pgAdmin on Linux Mint. pgAdmin is one of the main management and query tools for PostgreSQL, which I like to use in conjunction with DBeaver.
Installation
The pgAdmin tool isn’t in the standard Linux Mint repositories, only phpPgAdmin, which is a web-based tool, similar to the legendary phpMyAdmin. We can search the apt repositories with:
apt search pgadmin
We only see the aforementioned phpPgAdmin.
If we head over to the pgAdmin APT Download Page, we see some install instructions, I’ll run through them below, as they were at the time of publication:
# Install the public key for the repository (if not done previously):
curl -fsS https://www.pgadmin.org/static/packages_pgadmin_org.pub | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/packages-pgadmin-org.gpg
The above command outputs nothing to the terminal, but we can verify it worked by running an ls command on the full file path:
ls /usr/share/keyrings/packages-pgadmin-org.gpg
Onto the next step. Here we add the repository information to a sources file and then update apt’s cache:
# Create the repository configuration file:
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/packages-pgadmin-org.gpg] https://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/pgadmin/pgadmin4/apt/$(lsb_release -cs) pgadmin4 main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgadmin4.list && apt update'
We now hit an error:
The error tells us that the repository we added does not have a release file.
Let’s investigate by browsing the repository without a release file – ftp.postgresql.org/pub/pgadmin/pgadmin4/apt/zara
We get a 404 error. Let’s navigate up a level to ftp.postgresql.org/pub/pgadmin/pgadmin4/apt/:
As we can see, there is no directory called zara, and that is why the repository does not have a release file – it does not exist!
The directory names in the screenshot above are the codenames of various Debian and Ubuntu versions. We are using Linux Mint, which has its own version names.
If we look back at the line which adds the repository…
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/packages-pgadmin-org.gpg] https://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/pgadmin/pgadmin4/apt/$(lsb_release -cs) pgadmin4 main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgadmin4.list && apt update'
…we can see that the part of the URL after /apt is generated by the command $(lsb_release -cs).
Let’s see what that returns:
echo $(lsb_release -cs)
There is the problem – this command returns the release name (zara in the case of the Linux Mint 22.2 installation I am using) and so this gives us the invalid URL:
https://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/pgadmin/pgadmin4/apt/zara
We know this URL doesn’t exist as we got the 404 error when browsing to it.
The installation instructions assume you are using Debian or Ubuntu and not a downstream distribution such as Mint (in fairness, the supported platforms only list Debian and Ubuntu versions).
Since I initially wrote this post back in October 2025, there is a prominent warning that has been added to the page, which would have made the issue more obvious at the time:
Fixing it
The issue is easy to resolve though, we just need to change the line that adds the repository slightly. We need to replace the lsb_release subshell call to the literal text noble (Ubuntu 24.04, which is the package base for Linux Mint 22.2)
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/packages-pgadmin-org.gpg] https://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/pgadmin/pgadmin4/apt/noble pgadmin4 main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgadmin4.list && apt update'
Now, with the repository successfully added, we can continue with the installation as per the pgAdmin download page instructions, though I’ll skip the web mode installation as I only want the desktop version:
# Install for desktop mode only:
sudo apt install pgadmin4-desktop
With that, we now have pgAdmin installed on Linux Mint:
References / Further Reading
pgAdmin Development Team — Download Page
pgAdmin Development Team — Download Page (Wayback Machine – September 2025)