phpMyAdmin does not apply any special security methods to the MySQL database server. It is still the system administrator’s job to grant permissions on the MySQL databases properly. phpMyAdmin’s Users page can be used for this.
Warning
Mac users should note that if you are on a version before Mac OS X, StuffIt unstuffs with Mac formats. So you’ll have to resave as in BBEdit to Unix style ALL phpMyAdmin scripts before uploading them to your server, as PHP seems not to like Mac-style end of lines character (“\r”).
phpMyAdmin is included in most Linux distributions. It is recommended to use distribution packages when possible - they usually provide integration to your distribution and you will automatically get security updates from your distribution.
Debian’s package repositories include a phpMyAdmin package, but be aware that the configuration file is maintained in /etc/phpmyadmin and may differ in some ways from the official phpMyAdmin documentation.
OpenSUSE already comes with phpMyAdmin package, just install packages from the openSUSE Build Service.
Ubuntu ships phpMyAdmin package, however if you want to use recent version, you can use packages from PPA for Michal Čihař.
Gentoo ships the phpMyAdmin package, both in a near stock configuration as well as in a webapp-config configuration. Use emerge dev-db/phpmyadmin to install.
Mandriva ships the phpMyAdmin package in their contrib branch and can be installed via the usual Control Center.
Fedora ships the phpMyAdmin package, but be aware that the configuration file is maintained in /etc/phpMyAdmin/ and may differ in some ways from the official phpMyAdmin documentation.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself and thus derivatives like CentOS don’t ship phpMyAdmin, but the Fedora-driven repository Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) is doing so, if it’s enabled. But be aware that the configuration file is maintained in /etc/phpMyAdmin/ and may differ in some ways from the official phpMyAdmin documentation.
The easiest way to get phpMyAdmin on Windows is using third party products which include phpMyAdmin together with a database and web server such as XAMPP.
You can find more of such options at Wikipedia.
To manually create the file, simply use your text editor to create the file config.inc.php (you can copy config.sample.inc.php to get minimal configuration file) in the main (top-level) phpMyAdmin directory (the one that contains index.php). phpMyAdmin first loads libraries/config.default.php and then overrides those values with anything found in config.inc.php. If the default value is okay for a particular setting, there is no need to include it in config.inc.php. You’ll need a few directives to get going, a simple configuration may look like this:
<?php
$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = 'ba17c1ec07d65003'; // use here a value of your choice
$i=0;
$i++;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'cookie';
?>
Or, if you prefer to not be prompted every time you log in:
<?php
$i=0;
$i++;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = 'root';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = 'cbb74bc'; // use here your password
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'config';
?>
For a full explanation of possible configuration values, see the Configuration of this document.
Instead of manually editing config.inc.php, you can use the Setup Script. First you must manually create a folder config in the phpMyAdmin directory. This is a security measure. On a Linux/Unix system you can use the following commands:
cd phpMyAdmin
mkdir config # create directory for saving
chmod o+rw config # give it world writable permissions
And to edit an existing configuration, copy it over first:
cp config.inc.php config/ # copy current configuration for editing
chmod o+w config/config.inc.php # give it world writable permissions
On other platforms, simply create the folder and ensure that your web server has read and write access to it. 1.26 I just installed phpMyAdmin in my document root of IIS but I get the error “No input file specified” when trying to run phpMyAdmin. can help with this.
Next, open setup/ in your browser. If you have an existing configuration, use the Load button to bring its content inside the setup panel. Note that changes are not saved to disk until explicitly choose ``Save`` from the Configuration area of the screen. Normally the script saves the new config.inc.php to the config/ directory, but if the webserver does not have the proper permissions you may see the error “Cannot load or save configuration.” Ensure that the config/ directory exists and has the proper permissions - or use the Download link to save the config file locally and upload it (via FTP or some similar means) to the proper location.
Once the file has been saved, it must be moved out of the config/ directory and the permissions must be reset, again as a security measure:
mv config/config.inc.php . # move file to current directory
chmod o-rw config.inc.php # remove world read and write permissions
rm -rf config # remove not needed directory
Now the file is ready to be used. You can choose to review or edit the file with your favorite editor, if you prefer to set some advanced options which the setup script does not provide.
For a whole set of new features (bookmarks, comments, SQL-history, tracking mechanism, PDF-generation, column contents transformation, etc.) you need to create a set of special tables. Those tables can be located in your own database, or in a central database for a multi-user installation (this database would then be accessed by the controluser, so no other user should have rights to it).
Please look at your ./examples/ directory, where you should find a file called create_tables.sql. (If you are using a Windows server, pay special attention to 1.23 I’m running MySQL on a Win32 machine. Each time I create a new table the table and column names are changed to lowercase!).
If you already had this infrastructure and upgraded to MySQL 4.1.2 or newer, please use examples/upgrade_tables_mysql_4_1_2+.sql and then create new tables by importing examples/create_tables.sql.
You can use your phpMyAdmin to create the tables for you. Please be aware that you may need special (administrator) privileges to create the database and tables, and that the script may need some tuning, depending on the database name.
After having imported the examples/create_tables.sql file, you should specify the table names in your config.inc.php file. The directives used for that can be found in the Configuration. You will also need to have a controluser with the proper rights to those tables (see section Using authentication modes below).
Simply copy config.inc.php from your previous installation into the newly unpacked one. Configuration files from old versions may require some tweaking as some options have been changed or removed. For compatibility with PHP 6, remove a set_magic_quotes_runtime(0); statement that you might find near the end of your configuration file.
You should not copy libraries/config.default.php over config.inc.php because the default configuration file is version- specific.
If you have upgraded your MySQL server from a version previous to 4.1.2 to version 5.x or newer and if you use the phpMyAdmin configuration storage, you should run the SQL script found in examples/upgrade_tables_mysql_4_1_2+.sql.
HTTP and cookie authentication modes are recommended in a multi-user environment where you want to give users access to their own database and don’t want them to play around with others. Nevertheless be aware that MS Internet Explorer seems to be really buggy about cookies, at least till version 6. Even in a single-user environment, you might prefer to use HTTP or cookie mode so that your user/password pair are not in clear in the configuration file.
HTTP and cookie authentication modes are more secure: the MySQL login information does not need to be set in the phpMyAdmin configuration file (except possibly for the $cfg['Servers'][$i]['controluser']). However, keep in mind that the password travels in plain text, unless you are using the HTTPS protocol. In cookie mode, the password is stored, encrypted with the blowfish algorithm, in a temporary cookie.
For ‘HTTP‘ and ‘cookie’ modes, phpMyAdmin needs a controluser that has only the SELECT privilege on the `mysql`.`user` (all columns except `Password`), `mysql`.`db` (all columns), `mysql`.`host` (all columns) and `mysql`.`tables_priv` (all columns except `Grantor` and `Timestamp`) tables. You must specify the details for the controluser in the config.inc.php file under the $cfg['Servers'][$i]['controluser'] and $cfg['Servers'][$i]['controlpass'] settings. The following example assumes you want to use pma as the controluser and pmapass as the controlpass, but this is only an example: use something else in your file! Input these statements from the phpMyAdmin SQL Query window or mysql command–line client. Of course you have to replace localhost with the webserver’s host if it’s not the same as the MySQL server’s one.
GRANT USAGE ON mysql.* TO 'pma'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'pmapass';
GRANT SELECT (
Host, User, Select_priv, Insert_priv, Update_priv, Delete_priv,
Create_priv, Drop_priv, Reload_priv, Shutdown_priv, Process_priv,
File_priv, Grant_priv, References_priv, Index_priv, Alter_priv,
Show_db_priv, Super_priv, Create_tmp_table_priv, Lock_tables_priv,
Execute_priv, Repl_slave_priv, Repl_client_priv
) ON mysql.user TO 'pma'@'localhost';
GRANT SELECT ON mysql.db TO 'pma'@'localhost';
GRANT SELECT ON mysql.host TO 'pma'@'localhost';
GRANT SELECT (Host, Db, User, Table_name, Table_priv, Column_priv)
ON mysql.tables_priv TO 'pma'@'localhost';
If you want to use the many new relation and bookmark features:
GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE ON <pma_db>.* TO 'pma'@'localhost';
(this of course requires that your phpMyAdmin configuration storage be set up).
Then each of the true users should be granted a set of privileges on a set of particular databases. Normally you shouldn’t give global privileges to an ordinary user, unless you understand the impact of those privileges (for example, you are creating a superuser). For example, to grant the user real_user with all privileges on the database user_base:
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON user_base.* TO 'real_user'@localhost IDENTIFIED BY 'real_password';
What the user may now do is controlled entirely by the MySQL user management system. With HTTP or cookie authentication mode, you don’t need to fill the user/password fields inside the $cfg['Servers'].
The Swekey is a low cost authentication USB key that can be used in web applications. When Swekey authentication is activated, phpMyAdmin requires the users’s Swekey to be plugged before entering the login page (currently supported for cookie authentication mode only). Swekey Authentication is disabled by default. To enable it, add the following line to config.inc.php:
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_swekey_config'] = '/etc/swekey.conf';
You then have to create the swekey.conf file that will associate each user with their Swekey Id. It is important to place this file outside of your web server’s document root (in the example, it is located in /etc). A self documented sample file is provided in the examples directory. Feel free to use it with your own users’ information. If you want to purchase a Swekey please visit http://phpmyadmin.net/auth_key since this link provides funding for phpMyAdmin.
The phpMyAdmin team tries hardly to make the application secure, however there are always ways to make your installation more secure: