Windows Part 8
Installing PHPMyAdmin
1.) So it seems like we are getting close to the end of this tutorial. You did great if you got up to this point and got everything working. I am proud of you. So we are basically going to download the PHPMyAdmin
files and we’re basically going to do the same thing we did on Linux
. So open up your favorite web browser if you don’t already have it opened and open up a new tab. Type in the address bar phpmyadmin.net.
2.) Once you are on the PHPMyAdmin
website, there’s three green buttons at the top right. It should list Download 4.6.x.x
, Try demo
, and Donate
. Click on Download 4.6.x.x
where x.x are the version numbers. Yours might be different from mine and that’s okay. The current one we are using for this tutorial is 4.6.5.2
. Yours might be an up-to-date version. That’s even better.
3.) When you click on the Download
button, it’ll prompt you a modal box along with your download. Save the compressed file by clicking on the Ok
button. This should be stored in your default Downloads
directory. You can close out of this tab and other various tabs if you want. You don’t have to keep these tabs opened as they will most likely waste space. But if you want to follow along, that’s fine.
4.) Open File Explorer
and browse to your Downloads
directory. Again, you can use the Downloads
history dropdown list if you really wanted to. It’s up to you.
5.) Once your Downloads
directory is opened, browse into the PHPMyAdmin
compressed file. The one for this tutorial is called phpMyAdmin-4.6.5.2-all-languages.zip
. Yours might be different and that’s okay.
6.) Again, we’re going to extract this compressed file into our Downloads
directory. So in the top menu, click on the Extract
option and from the expanded menu, click on Extract All
. Leave the extraction location as you see it. It’ll extract it to the Downloads
directory.
7.) Once the extraction process is finished, rename the directory to PHPMyAdmin
.
8.) Copy&paste or Cut&paste the PHPMyAdmin
directory. Browse to your development environment and paste the PHPMyAdmin
directory there. The development environment should be C:/dev/www
or C:/ Drive
> dev
> www
.
9.) Open up your favorite web browser and open up a new tab. Type in the address bar phpmyadmin.localhost.com. Input your root
account password and username. My root
username is root
and the password is root
.
10.) If you are able to log in and get to this page, that means everything is working fine. If you get an error, you’ll have to fix it. If the error says something along the lines of “connection refused” or “connection lost” or “no connection”, that means that the MySQL
server isn’t running and it also could mean that during the installation process for MySQL
, you didn’t fix the problem that kept persisting so the MySQL
server was never properly installed. You should go back and uninstall the MySQL
server. Then reinstall it. The MySQL
server has to be up and running in order for you to actually have PHPMyAdmin
working. So if you have it working, scroll down the page. There will be two things that are being complained about. You’ll want to correct these two things if you want to keep PHPMyAdmin
working properly.
11.) The first message should usually be about not having a phpMyAdmin
table and what not. We’ll do this last because we’re still going to have to modify the configuration file which is what we also need in order to get rid of the blowfish_secret
warning. So let’s do that. Open up File Explorer
and browse to C:/dev/www/PHPMyAdmin
or C:/ Drive
> dev
> www
> PHPMyAdmin
. Scroll down to where you can see the file config.sample.inc.php
. Either create a copy of it or rename it to config.inc.php
.
12.) Again, you can either drag and drop the file straight into the Text Editor
from the current location or you can browse to it. C:/dev/www/PHPMyAdmin/
and then config.inc.php
or C:/ Drive
> dev
> www
> PHPMyAdminand then
config.inc.php`.
13.) Open up your favorite web browser again and open up a new tab. Type in your address bar google.com and search for the term phpmyadmin blowfish generator
. It should be the first link that appears in the Google
results. If you cannot find it, you can click on this link.
14.) You should be on the phpMyAdmin Blowfish Secret Generator
page of question-defense.com. Scroll down about half way. You’ll see a randomly generated blowfish_secret text. Copy that and go back to your favorite Text Editor
.
15.) With the blowfish_secret text copied, paste it in between the single quotes on the line that reads $cfg['blowfish_secret'] = '';
So you should have a random text in between = '';
.
16.) Now, scroll down to line #47. That line should read // $cfg['Servers'][$i]['pmadb'] = 'phpmyadmin';
Uncomment it and every line until line #67. That should be the end point of things that you are required to uncomment in this file.
17.) Again, open up your favorite web browser if it isn’t already opened and open a new tab. This time, go to google.com and search for the term phpmyadmin examples/create_tables.sql
. By default, the new PHPMyAdmin
libraries do not provide the examples
directory that we need in order for us to get PHPMyAdmin
working. Older versions of PHPMyAdmin
should contain this directory, but we can still find it on the web. The first link should be the correct one. It’s stored on a github repository.
18.) Once you’re on the github
repository, click on the Raw
button at the far right middle of the page. This will give us the raw file that we need. Right-click on a blank part of the page and from the context menu, click on Select All
and copy it.
19.) If you haven’t closed out of the PHPMyAdmin
tab yet. Browse back to it. If you already have, it’s fine. Just open a new tab and type in the address bar phpmyadmin.localhost.com. Once you’re on the home page of phpmyadmin.localhost.com
, click on the SQL
tab at the top. This will load up an SQL
terminal where you can run SQL
queries. It doesn’t really matter which page you are on, at least it’s a SQL
tab. Now paste all the information you just copied from the github
repository and click on the Go
button at the lower right hand corner. Wait for a bit for the query to run and you should get something that looks like the second picture below.
20.) Once you are finished with the SQL
tab, click on the Databases
tab on the left of the SQL
tab. We’re just going to create a test database to make sure that we can connect to MySQL
and have PHP
running on Apache
. So just type test
into the text field and click on the Create
button.
21.) Browse into the test
table if you aren’t already by default. You can also just click on the test
link at the left sidebar. That will also browse you into the test
table as well.
22.) In the text field in the Create table
section, type in users
with a column of 2 and hit the Go
button.
23.) In the first column; specify id
as the name, int
type, with a length/value of 11
, set id
to primary key, and set it to auto_increment
. For the second column; specify name
as the name, text
type, and you should normally set the Default value to NULL
, but for tutorial purposes, we’re just going to save time. Once you are done with that, scroll down and at the bottom right hand corner, hit the Save
button. It should lead you back to the Structure
tab.
24.) Browse out of the users
column by clicking on the test
table at the left sidebar. This will bring you back to the test
table. This time, click on the SQL
tab.
25.) You can input anything you’d like for the name. For this tutorial, we’re going to just use three random names. spaceshiptrooper
, Admin
, and Demo
. So in the text area, type in INSERT INTO users VALUES(1, 'spaceshiptrooper');
. Then do the same with the other 2 demo names. We’re just doing this to make sure we can actually connect and display data from the database. Once you are done, click on the Go
button to make changes.
26.) You can use the snippet that I provide in the introduction post if you’d like or you can create your own and test it.
27.) If all works, you should be able to display data like the below picture. If it didn’t work and you get a PHP
error, remember. Go to C:/dev/logs/error.log
to find out why. Sometimes error logs aren’t captured. You might need to do some research if the error halts, but aren’t being displayed and error logs are turned on.