Installing phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin is a very popular MySQL administration tool written in PHP. It allows you to manage your MySQL databases using a simple-to-use web interface. The official web page is http://www.phpmyadmin.net. Follow these steps to install and configure this program:

1. Start by downloading the latest version of phpMyAdmin from http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/downloads.php. If you aren’t sure what file to download, the safest bet is to go with the zip archive.

2. Unzip the archive somewhere on your disk. The archive contains a folder named with the complete phpMyAdmin version (for example, at the time of this writing, the folder for the beta version of phpMyAdmin is called phpMyAdmin-2.8.0-beta1).

3. To make your life easier, rename this folder to simply phpMyAdmin.

4. Move the phpMyAdmin folder to the htdocs folder of Apache 2 (by default C:\Program Files\Apache Group\Apache2\htdocs).

5. To make sure your phpMyAdmin installation is accessible by Apache, load http://localhost/phpMyAdmin in your favorite web browser. If everything worked OK, you should get a message such as this:

   

   Figure A.4: phpMyAdmin Doesn’t Have Access to MySQL

6. The error message is suggestive enough—you need to instruct phpMyAdmin how to access your MySQL server. Under the phpMyAdmin folder search for a file named config.inc.php. If you find this file, change its options as shown in the following code snippet. If you don’t find this file, create it with the following contents:

   <?php
   $cfg[‘PmaAbsoluteUri’] = “http://localhost/phpMyAdmin/”;
   $cfg[‘Servers’][1][‘host’] = “localhost”;
   $cfg[‘Servers’][1][‘auth_type’] = ‘config’; 
   $cfg[‘Servers’][1][‘user’] = “root”;
   $cfg[‘Servers’][1][‘password’] = “password”;
   ?>

   Note

   For more details on installing and using phpMyAdmin, see its documentation at http://www.phpmyadmin.net/home_page/docs.php. Packt Publishing has a separate book for those of you who want to learn more about phpMyAdmin—Mastering phpMyAdmin for Effective MySQL Management (ISBN: 1-904811-03-5). In case you’re not a native English speaker, it’s good to know that the book is also available in Czech, German, French, and Italian.