Adminer – A Simple & Secure Replacement For phpMyAdmin

Why replace phpMyAdmin with Adminer?

Replace phpMyAdmin with Adminer and you will get a tidier user interface, better support for MySQL features, higher performance and more security.

Adminer development priorities are: 1. Security, 2. User experience, 3. Performance, 4. Feature set, 5. Size.

Works with MySQL, MariaDB, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MS SQL, Oracle, SimpleDB, Elasticsearch, MongoDB. And it's only a single PHP file!

After playing around with Adminer, I have to agree with the description above that it is an overall better experience. I will describe two ways to install Adminer and there are more ways at the bottom of this page in the References section.

Method 1

1. Download the file here: http://www.adminer.org/latest.php
At the time of this writing, version 4.7.1 – the mirror is here: https://github.com/vrana/adminer/releases 

2. Upload the file to any publicly accessible directory on the server such as: /var/www/html/ or /var/www/html/mysite.com/ or /var/www/html/mysite.com/adminer/ or any other named directory you choose.

For security purposes, you can even change the file name from adminer-4.7.1.php to anything else you want, such as: adminer.php or xyz45secret.php or whatever… (you get the point).

3. Now just point your browser to the file (e.g. https://mysite.com/adminer/xyz45secret.php) to login. That's it! There is no need to specify a specific database on the login screen if you want to view them all.

Method 2 – via the command line

1. SSH into your server

2. (Optionally) Create a new directory (name it whatever you want) and cd into it:

$ sudo mkdir /var/www/html/adminer
$ cd /var/www/html/adminer

3. Download the latest version of Adminer into the directory:

$ sudo wget "http://www.adminer.org/latest.php"

4. (Optionally) Change the name of the file to whatever you want:

$ sudo mv latest.php anyname.php

5. Point your browser to the file and login. In this case, https://mysite.com/adminer/anyname.php

More ways to install

You can also intall Adminer via the command ‘sudo apt install adminer' but the version there may be out of date.

To install Adminer into a non-standard directory such as ‘/usr/shar/adminer' see the techrepublic article below in the References section.

REFERENCES

https://www.adminer.org/
https://sourceforge.net/p/adminer/discussion/960418/thread/26bcaf5b3a/
https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-to-make-mysql-administration-simple-with-adminer/

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