Installing phpMyAdmin on Mac OS X Lion

Mac OS X by default ships with Apache web server which we will use to install (configure) phpMyAdmin to manage MySQL server installed previously on Mac OS X 10.7 (aka Lion). At the end of this step-by-step tutorial, you should be able to access phpMyAdmin by opening http://localhost/phpMyAdmin in your preferred browser.

In this tutorial we will be using Terminal to move files around and edit/create files using command line.

Installing phpMyAdmin

1. Start Apache if it’s not already running (You can check by running command “ps -ef | grep httpd” in terminal)
   1. Open System Preferences and Click Sharing

      Start Apache Mac OS X

   2. Check Web Sharing Checkbox which should start web server (Apache) on your Mac
   3. Open http://localhost in browser and you should see default page (on mine it just says “It Works” in H1 Tag)

      Mac OS X Apache Homepage

2. By default, PHP module is not activated. Uncomment the line ”LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so” in file “/private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf” to enable PHP on Mac OS X Apache web server. Default PHP version is PHP 5.3 (PHP 5.3.6 to be precise)
3. Download phpMyAdmin (Latest version at the time of writing this is 3.4.3.1) fromphpMyAdmin Site. Download page has quite a few options in terms of language and compresssion formats, so download the most relevant language pack and compression format you are comfortable with. (I downloaded phpMyAdmin-3.4.3.1-english.zip, please note your version may be different )
4. Open Terminal and Extract downloaded package to /usr/local/ by running command  “sudo unzip phpMyAdmin-3.4.3.1-english.zip -d /usr/local/“
5. Rename phpMyAdmin-3.4.3.1-english to phpMyAdmin by using command “sudo mv /usr/local/phpMyAdmin-3.4.3.1-english /usr/local/phpMyAdmin” in Terminal
6. Switch to phpMyAdmin directory using “cd /usr/local/phpMyAdmin” to create phpMyAdmin config file
7. By default config.inc.php file does not exist but phpMyAdmin ships with sample config which we can use. Copy config.sample.inc.php to config.inc.php using “sudo cp config.sample.inc.php config.inc.php“
8. Edit config.inc.php using your favorite editor (I prefer vi) and change $cfg[‚Servers‘][$i][‚host‘] = ‘localhost’; to $cfg[‚Servers‘][$i][‚host‘] = ‚127.0.0.1‘;

   *Well it sounds stupid because localhost and 127.0.0.1 are same in networking world but phpMyAdmin won’t let you (At least me) log in without this change and keeps throwing error “#2002 Cannot log in to the MySQL server”

   **If your MySQL is running on a different host/port, you can change them in this file

   ***You can also use setup wizard offered by phpMyAdmin to configure phpMyAdmin further

   ****You can also add random blowfish secret to config.inc.php to encrypt your session cookies.

9. Configure Apache to enable /phpMyAdmin
   1. Create phpMyAdmin apache config file with below text in bold in /etc/apach2/other/ directory using your favorite editor  “sudo vi /etc/apache2/other/phpMyAdmin.conf“Alias /phpMyAdmin /usr/local/phpMyAdmin

      <Directory /usr/local/phpMyAdmin>

      Options Indexes

      Order allow,deny

      Allow from all

      </Directory>

10. Restart Apache by typing command sudo apachectl restart in terminal
11. Open http://localhost/phpMyAdmin in your browser and you should see phpMyAdmin Login Page

    Mac OS X phpMyAdmin Login Screen

*Note Default phpMyAdmin does not allow you to login with empty passwords, you can change this behaviour but it is highly recommended to have password for mysql server accounts.

*Default login is admin with empty password