My last post on installing phpMyAdmin became pretty popular, so I wanted to let everyone know that there is another way to do it too.
You can use the EPEL repository and do a yum install phpmyadmin and it will work. Warning: The Epel repo is what is used by Fedora and is pretty much the latest and not-always-greatest version of software. If you choose to do this, be sure and disable the EPEL repo when done.
First up, install MySQL.
Install MySQL
To get started we need to install MySQL
yum install mysql-server
Now start it up
service mysqld start OR /etc/init.d/mysqld start
Now we need to secure it:
/usr/bin/mysql_secure_installation
It is going to ask you handful of questions:
Current Root Password
You will be asked for your current root password. Because this is a new installation it is set to none. Press enter.
Set Root Password
If the above step worked correctly you should be prompted with a question asking you if you would like to set your root password. Please press Y and press Enter.
You will be asked for your root password twice. If it works you will see Success!
Removing Anonymous Users
You will be prompted to remove the MySQL anonymous users. For security reasons we want to do this. The text above the question explains this topic in more detail. Press Y and then Enter.
Disallow Root Login
You will be asked if you would like to disallow remote login for the root user and only allow connections from the server itself. To keep our server secure you want to say Y and press Enter.
Delete test Database
MySQL ships with a default database called test. This is not needed and can be deleted. Press Y and then Enter to delete the test database and it’s associated users.
Reload Privilege Tables
This step will reload the user settings (called privilege tables) so all user changes will take effect. Press Y and then Enter to continue.
This post won’t go into setting up additional users besides root and assigning them privileges. For information on that, check out the Cloud Servers Knowledge Base: http://cloudservers.rackspacecloud.com/index.php/CentOS_5.4#MySQL
Install EPEL Repo
Now that MySQL is installed, let’s install the EPEL Repo. To do that, as root run
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/i386/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
Now, if you ls -al /etc/yum.repos.d/ you should see epel.repo and epel-testing.repo. Nice.
Install phpMyAdmin
Next up, just do a yum install of phpmyadmin:
yum install phpmyadmin
This will gather all of the dependencies and install apache and php for you if they aren’t already there.
Next, we need to modify the phpMyAdmin apache conf file because by default it restricts access to only localhost. Personally, I think you are better off getting your IP and only allowing that IP instead of opening up phpMyAdmin to the world. Head over to http://icanhazip.com/ and grab your IP address (thanks to Major at RackerHacker.com for the link). Once you have your IP, edit the file /etc/httpd/conf.d/phpMyAdmin.conf to allow that IP. For example, let’s say your IP is 70.115.251.196. You would change the part of the file that looks like this:
<Directory /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/> order deny,allow deny from all allow from 127.0.0.1 allow from ::1 </Directory>
To instead look like this:
<Directory /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/> order deny,allow deny from all allow from 127.0.0.1 allow from ::1 allow from 70.115.251.196 </Directory>
Save the file, and then start apache:
/etc/init.d/apache restart
You may need to also add in iptables rule by running the following commands:
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 80 -j ACCEPT /etc/init.d/iptables save
That’s it. Visit http://IpOfTheServer/phpmyadmin in a browser and login as the root user and whatever mysql password you setup.
House Cleaning
Disable the EPEL repo. This is generally a good idea because if you wanted Fedora you would have installed Fedora instead of CentOS. Edit the /etc/yum.repos.d/epel.repo file and epel-testing.repo file and change anywhere that it says ‘enabled=1′ to be ‘enabled=0′
If you found this useful or have anything to add please post a comment!