Installing and configuring phpMyAdmin in Linux

phpMyAdmin is a web based graphical administration tool for MySQL RDBMS, written in PHP. Using phpMyAdmin can ease your database administration tasks. Therefore, installing it in your machine is useful and this short guide will walk you through setting it up in your Linux. Installing this in Windows is just a matter of installing the WAMP server installer package which has everything, including MySQL server packaged into one bundle.

Even, in Linux you may choose to use a package called LAMP, which is easy to install and have everything bundled together. But for certain reason, may be you want to install MySQL separately in a remote server or you have MySQL already installed in your distribution, you would need to install phpMyAdmin separately as described below.

The phpMyAdmin needs a MySQL database already installed. If you haven't got it installed, see my previous post on 'Installing MySQL in Linux'.

Assuming you have installed MySQL, do the following to install phpMyAdmin, whichever is applicable to your distribution

$ sudo apt-get install phpMyAdmin
$ sudo yum install phpMyAdmin

During the installation, you will be prompted for the web server to serve the phpMyAdmin. Select 'Apache2' for that. You may also be asked to provide administration credentials, which you can provide on your wish and note it down as it's required while you login. You can also use an existing MySQL user credentials to login to phpMyAdmin.

The installation might start the apache web server and copy the phpmyadmin.conf into /etc/apache2/conf.d directory. In certain distribution like Fedora, the apache2 directory is named httpd. Replace the directory appropriately. You can check it by listing the directory content of /etc/apache2/conf.d. If you don't find it, you can copy it manually as follows and can reload the apache web server.

$ sudo ln -s /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf

$ sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

or in RHEL/Fedora

$ sudo service httpd restart

Note: As per documentations, after Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander), apache will load configuration files from /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/ directory instead of from /etc/apache2/conf.d/. Therefore if you are using Ubuntu 13.10 or later, do the above step for /etc/apache2/conf-enabled/ and reload the web server.

Ok that's it. Now you may start administering your MySQL database with phpMyAdmin. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://<hostname>/phpmyadmin. If your apache web server is in local machine, replace <hostname> with localhost. Provide the username and the password that you configured in the installation or you may use an existing MySQL user credential. Then you would see the following phpMyAdmin page for administration. Good luck in using MySQL.