Quick guide to phpMyAdmin

This article explains how to get phpMyAdmin up and running on a Windows machine. It is however only ment to handle your databases running on localhost and should not be used for production environment.

Download the latest zip file from phpMyAdmin and unpack it to your htdocs directory in Apache. As of version 2.8 phpMyAdmin comes with an installer, which probably is a great feature if you’re an advanced database administrator. I on the other hand liked the old way, where all you needed to do was updating/filling in the config file.

Fortunately this option is still available. Create a file called config.inc.php and save it to phpMyAdmin’s root directory. This file will override the settings in libraries/config.default.php, so you can simply take out the parts you actually need to change and place them in the newly created file. Below is an example of how I set up my config file, you may off course add/remove stuff that you need/don’t need…

<?php
/* Start Servers Config */
$i = 0;

/* Server localhost (config:root) */
$i++;

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'localhost';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['connect_type'] = 'tcp';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['compress'] = false;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['controluser'] = 'someuser';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['controlpass'] = 'somepswd';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'config';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = 'root';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = 'rootpswd';

/* End Servers Config */

/* If you downloaded a theme and will make it default*/
$cfg['ThemeDefault']        = 'arctic_ocean';

/* Adds a link to phpinfo on the frontpage */
$cfg['ShowPhpInfo']         = TRUE;

/* Adds a link to display all rows in a table on one page */
$cfg['ShowAll']             = TRUE;
?>

That’s it! By filling in the users and passwords you should be up and running in a few minutes…