How to Install and Secure phpMyAdmin on Ubuntu 12.04

bout phpMyAdmin

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phpMyAdmin is an free web software to work with MySQL on the web—it provides a convenient visual front end to the MySQL capabilities.

Setup

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The steps in this tutorial require the user to have root privileges on your virtual private server. You can see how to set that up here in steps 3 and 4.

Before working with phpMyAdmin you need to have LAMP installed on your server. If you don't have the Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP stack on your server, you can find the tutorial for setting it up here.

Once you have the user and required software, you can start installing phpMyAdmin on your VPS!

Install phpMyAdmin

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The easiest way to install phpmyadmin is through apt-get:

sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin

During the installation, phpMyAdmin will walk you through a basic configuration. Once the process starts up, follow these steps:

• Select Apache2 for the server


• Choose YES when asked about whether to Configure the database for phpmyadmin with dbconfig-common


• Enter your MySQL password when prompted


• Enter the password that you want to use to log into phpmyadmin

After the installation has completed, add phpmyadmin to the apache configuration.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Add the phpmyadmin config to the file.

Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf

Restart apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

You can then access phpmyadmin by going to youripaddress/phpmyadmin. The screen should look like this

Security

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Unfortunately older versions of phpMyAdmin have had serious security vulnerabilities including allowing remote users to eventually exploit root on the underlying virtual private server. One can prevent a majority of these attacks through a simple process: locking down the entire directory with Apache's native user/password restrictions which will prevent these remote users from even attempting to exploit older versions of phpMyAdmin.

Set Up the .htaccess File

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To set this up start off by allowing the .htaccess file to work within the phpmyadmin directory. You can accomplish this in the phpmyadmin configuration file:

sudo nano /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf 

Under the directory section, add the line “AllowOverride All” under “Directory Index”, making the section look like this:

<Directory /usr/share/phpmyadmin>
        Options FollowSymLinks
        DirectoryIndex index.php
        AllowOverride All
        [...]

Configure the .htaccess file

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With the .htaccess file allowed, we can proceed to set up a native user whose login would be required to even access the phpmyadmin login page.

Start by creating the .htaccess page in the phpmyadmin directory:
Start by creating the .htaccess page in the phpmyadmin directory:

sudo nano /usr/share/phpmyadmin/.htaccess

Follow up by setting up the user authorization within .htaccess file. Copy and paste the following text in:

AuthType Basic
AuthName "Restricted Files"
AuthUserFile /path/to/passwords/.htpasswd
Require valid-user

Below you’ll see a quick explanation of each line

• AuthType: This refers to the type of authentication that will be used to the check the passwords. The passwords are checked via HTTP and the keyword Basic should not be changed.
• AuthName: This is text that will be displayed at the password prompt. You can put anything here.
• AuthUserFile: This line designates the server path to the password file (which we will create in the next step.)
• Require valid-user: This line tells the .htaccess file that only users defined in the password file can access the phpMyAdmin login screen.

Create the htpasswd file

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Now we will go ahead and create the valid user information. Start by creating a htpasswd file. Use the htpasswd command, and place the file in a directory of your choice as long as it is not accessible from a browser. Although you can name the password file whatever you prefer, the convention is to name it .htpasswd.

sudo htpasswd -c  /path/to/passwords/.htpasswd username

A prompt will ask you to provide and confirm your password. Once the username and passwords pair are saved you can see that the password is encrypted in the file.

FInish up by restarting apache:

sudo service apache2 restart

Accessing phpMyAdmin

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phpMyAdmin will now be much more secure since only authorized users will be able to reach the login page. Accessing youripaddress/phpmyadmin should display a screen like this.

Fill it in with the username and password that you generated. After you login you can access phpmyadmin with the MySQL username and password.

NOTE :
when you install mysql with no password, you can not log into phpmyadmin
- To log to phpmyadmin, you do it like below:

Create new user:
mysql -u root -p
grant ALL on trivan.* to trivan@localhost identified by 'password';

OR

mysqladmin command to change root password

If you have never set a root password for MySQL server, the server does not require a password at all for connecting as root. To setup root password for first time, use mysqladmin command at shell prompt as follows: $ mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD
However, if you want to change (or update) a root password, then you need to use the following command: $ mysqladmin -u root -p'oldpassword' password newpass
For example, If the old password is abc, you can set the new password to 123456, enter:

$ mysqladmin -u root -p'abc' password '123456'

Change MySQL password for other users

To change a normal user password you need to type (let us assume you would like to change password for user vivek) the following command: $ mysqladmin -u vivek -p oldpassword password newpass

Changing MySQL root user password using MySQL sql command

This is another method. MySQL stores username and passwords in user table inside MySQL database. You can directly update password using the following method to update or change password for user vivek:
1) Login to mysql server, type the following command at shell prompt: $ mysql -u root -p
2) Use mysql database (type command at mysql> prompt):

mysql> use mysql;

3) Change password for user vivek, enter:

mysql> update user set password=PASSWORD("NEWPASSWORD") where User='vivek';

4) Finally, reload the privileges:

mysql> flush privileges;
mysql> quit

The last method can be used with PHP, Python or Perl scripting mysql API.