How to install and configure phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin is a LAMP application specifically written for administering MySQL servers. Written in PHP, and accessed through a web browser, phpMyAdmin provides a graphical interface for database administration tasks.

Prerequisites

Before you can install phpMyAdmin, you will need access to a MySQL database – either on the same host as phpMyAdmin will be installed on, or on a host accessible over the network. For instructions on how to install a MySQL database service, see our MySQL guide.

You will also need a web server. In this guide we use Apache2, although you can use another if you prefer. If you would like instructions on how to install Apache2, see our Apache guide.

Install `phpmyadmin`

Once your MySQL database is set up, you can install phpmyadmin via the terminal:

sudo apt install phpmyadmin

At the prompt, choose which web server to configure for phpMyAdmin. Here, we are using Apache2 for the web server.

In a browser, go to http://servername/phpmyadmin (replace servername with the server’s actual hostname).

At the login, page enter root for the username. Or, if you have a MySQL user already set up, enter the MySQL user’s password.

Once logged in, you can reset the root password if needed, create users, create or destroy databases and tables, etc.

Configure `phpmyadmin`

The configuration files for phpMyAdmin are located in /etc/phpmyadmin. The main configuration file is /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php. This file contains configuration options that apply globally to phpMyAdmin.

To use phpMyAdmin to administer a MySQL database hosted on another server, adjust the following in /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php:

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'db_server';

Note:
Replace db_server with the actual remote database server name or IP address. Also, be sure that the phpMyAdmin host has permissions to access the remote database.

Once configured, log out of phpMyAdmin then back in again, and you should be accessing the new server.

Configuration files

The config.header.inc.php and config.footer.inc.php files in the /etc/phpmyadmin directory are used to add a HTML header and footer, respectively, to phpMyAdmin.

Another important configuration file is /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf. This file is symlinked to /etc/apache2/conf-available/phpmyadmin.conf, and once enabled, is used to configure Apache2 to serve the phpMyAdmin site. The file contains directives for loading PHP, directory permissions, etc. From a terminal type:

sudo ln -s /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf-available/phpmyadmin.conf
sudo a2enconf phpmyadmin.conf
sudo systemctl reload apache2.service