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.

Installing MySQL in Linux

MySQL is a very powerful open source relational database management system (RDBMS). In this short guide we'll get into installing MySQL on Linux.

You can check whether MySQL is already installed by issuing the following command.

$ mysql -V

You should see something similar output as follows if you have MySQL installed.

mysql  Ver 14.14 Distrib 5.5.32, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 6.2

If not, to install MySQL, run the following command from a terminal prompt in apt-get package manager based Linux distributions

$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server

In yum package manager based Linux distributions, issue the following command

$ sudo yum install mysql-server

You will be prompted to enter a password for the MySQL root user in the installation process. It's recommended to use a password for a root account. Now the MySQL server is installed on your Linux machine.

Alternatively, you may download the relevant MySQL package (e.g. rpm package) for your Linux from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/#downloads and install according to your distribution. You may need to sign up for an Oracle Web account to download from this site. This article won't go into details of installing with distribution specific packages.

MySQL installation could also be done with the source. You can also download the source distribution from the above URL. Installing from source needs certain tools and libraries pre-installed (such as cmake and ncurses-devel). Other workaround may be required to build from source.

To start the MySQL database, issue the following command.

$ sudo /etc/init.d/mysql start

or in Fedora/RHEL

$ sudo systemctl start mysqld.service

To check whether MySQL is already running, you can issue the following command.

$ mysqladmin -u root -p status

You will be prompted for the password. When entered, you should see somewhat similar output as follows if MySQL is running

Uptime: 28581  Threads: 1  Questions: 111  Slow queries: 0  Opens: 343  Flush tables: 1  Open         tables: 84  Queries per second avg: 0.003

If not running, you would see an output as shown below.

   mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed
   error: 'Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)'
   Check that mysqld is running and that the socket: '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' exists!

You can edit the settings for the MySQL instance in /etc/mysql/my.cnf file to configure the basic settings like log file and port number.

That's it. You now should have MySQL installed on your system and ready to use it to develop database driven applications.