ChrisBellini.com

Upon reviewing my web server’s logs, a lot of people stumble upon this website o’ mine by submitting queries for “ubuntu phpmyadmin” to search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN. I’ll assume that it’s because installing PHPMyAdmin on a fresh Ubuntu Linux install isn’t all that straightforward. Everybody lands on this post from last year. Unfortunately, I never actually mentioned how I installed PHPMyAdmin on Ubuntu in that post at all, so it’s probably pretty useless to most. Like Dr. Sam Beckett, I will attempt to put right what once went wrong, and hope that each time somebody wants to install PHPMyAdmin on Ubuntu, this will be the leap home.

Once you have installed Apache, PHP, MySQL and configured MySQL by creating users and maybe a database or two, you’ll quickly find out that you can’t install PHPMyAdmin from Synaptic or apt-get (Synaptic is merely a nice GUI for apt-get). The reason? All of the software (”packages” in Ubuntu parlance) that you can install via Synaptic or apt-get comes from repositories. Out-of-the-box, Ubuntu is configured to use only three Ubuntu-approved repositories, none of which have PHPMyAdmin on them. You can, however, add other repositories. On those other repositories, you’ll find PHPMyAdmin. To quickly add those repositories via Synaptic, go Settings | Repositories. For the Ubuntu 6.06 LTS, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS Security Updates, and Updates repositories, add the Official and Restricted Copyright to each one. Make sure you click the OK button for each repository to make the changes stick.

Now you can search for “phpmyadmin” in Synaptic.

Using apt-get from a console should accomplish the same thing:

Fire up your browser and go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin/, and you should be pleasantly surprised. Now, off you go to build the next Digg or Flickr. Or maybe skip the whole Web 2.0 flurry entirely and be a Web 3.0 pioneer; Web 3.0 being the designation given to websites that can…whoa whoa, I’m not giving away that secret just yet