Using phpmyadmin for multiple local and remote MySQL Servers_MySQL

phpmyadmin

Normally we need a client software to access MySQL server whether it is remote server or local. Most of the developers who use MySQL as back end database use phpmyadmin which is a web application. But when it comes to access the remote database, we use different client applications. MySQL Workbench is the official MySQL Client application/software which does pretty much good job for most of the cases. That’s why I think most of the developers choose this. In Windows I used to use SQLYog which is not yet free.

When I come to Ubuntu, which is my day to day development operating system, MySQL Workbench really sucks. It crashes everytime when I try to execute even any simple select queries. Several times I have felt it crashes without any notification, warning specially when I am in the middle of execution of UPDATE/INESRT statements. Becuase of this, I have faced problems qutie a lot since long time. Now its time to search for the alternative of it and I found phpmyadmin as a quite better solution for the moment.

Configuring phpmyadmin to manage multiple local and remote MySQL Servers

I assume that web server (Apache), PHP and phpmyadmin are already installed in the machine. phpmyadmin contains a configuration file named config.inc.php in the phpmyadmin’s main folder. Intially if you don’t find this file then you need to copy/rename config.sample.inc.php.

First of all lets see the main configurations in this file. The array named$cfgholds all the phpmyadmin’s setting values and$cfg['Servers']contains the different server’s configurations in another numerical index $i:
Initialize the$iindex variable for the array, you don’t have to do this but just make sure it exists almost on the top of the server configurations.

$i = 0;

The array for phpmyadmin in this case only works with non-zero numeric index, so lets increment index variable$iand start adding first server information. This first block normally exists there, uncomment if it is commented.

$i++;/* Authentication type */$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'config';$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = 'your_db_user';$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = 'your_db_password';/* Server parameters */$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'your_db_host';

Note:Here theauth_typeis for whether you want to enter the username and password or you want directly logged into server without asking to give username and password every time you want to access. So if you want to enter the username and password then make it‘cookie’or‘config’if you want automatically logged into phpmyadmin without promoting to enter username and password.
Now repeat the above configurations to add other servers:

$i++;/* Authentication type */$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'config';$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = 'your_another_db_user';$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = 'your_another_db_password';/* Server parameters */$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = 'your_another_db_host';

You can repeat this as many times as you want. Depending upon theauth_typethat you set, you will be prompted to select server on the login screen. If not, you will see a drop down on the left frame of the phpmyadmin’s screen to switch the server.

Raju Gautam

Zend Certified Engineer – PHP5, Solution Architect, Senior Web Development Professional

I started my career as very basic IT professional for a year, then as per my interest I swiftly moved my career in S/W development as VB/ASP programmer and went through RoR, Perl and PHP and have continued with PHP.

From the 10 years of total professional experiences, I have led few groups of different numbers of technical members in them. So I have mostly dealt with the technical teams and acted as a mediator between the team and the management team as well as the clients. I worked as Team Leader for 3.5 years, as Head Of Department for 3 years and Solution Architect (Technical Leader) for 1 year and handled from 3 to 20 members in a team. So managing as a leader (not as a manager), assigning them proper tasks as per their skill sets so that they become happy while working on the task and help them whenever needed were my major responsibilities during my leadership experiences.

Specialties: PHP, Zend, YII, CodeIgniter, Joomla, Magento, Weh Services, API, XML, JavaScript (jQuery, Mootools), MySQL, PgSQL, HTML, CSS, RoR, Perl, ASP!