Before installing phpMyAdmin you will need access to a MySQL database either on the same host as that phpMyAdmin is installed on, or on a host accessible over the network. For more information see the section called “MySQL”. From a terminal prompt enter:

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

At the prompt choose which web server to be configured for phpMyAdmin. The rest of this section will use Apache2 for the web server.

In a browser go to http://servername/phpmyadmin, replacing serveranme with the server's actual hostname. At the login, page enter root for the username, or another MySQL user if you any setup, and enter the MySQL user's password.

Once logged in you can reset the root password if needed, create users, create/destroy databases and tables, etc.

The configuration files for phpMyAdmin are located in /etc/phpmyadmin. The main configuration file is /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php. This file contains configuration options that apply globally to phpMyAdmin.

To use phpMyAdmin to administer a MySQL database hosted on another server, adjust the following in /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php:

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'db_server';

Once configured, log out of phpMyAdmin and back in, and you should be accessing the new server.

The config.header.inc.php and config.footer.inc.php files are used to add a HTML header and footer to phpMyAdmin.

Another important configuration file is /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf, this file is symlinked to /etc/apache2/conf.d/phpmyadmin.conf, and is used to configure Apache2 to serve the phpMyAdmin site. The file contains directives for loading PHP, directory permissions, etc. For more information on configuring Apache2 see the section called “HTTPD - Apache2 Web Server”.