How To Install Adminer on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Adminer on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Adminer (formerly PHPMyAdmin) is a full-featured database management tool written in PHP. Conversely to phpMyAdmin, it is a lightweight application with these priorities in order: security, user experience, performance, feature set, and size.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation Adminer on Ubuntu 18.04 server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 18.04 server.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Adminer on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Install LAMP (Linux, Apache, MariaDB, and PHP)  server.

A Ubuntu 18.04 LAMP server is required. If you do not have LAMP installed, you can follow our guide here.

Step 3. Configuring MariaDB for Adminer.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Next, we will need to log in to the MariaDB console and create a database for the Adminer. Run the following command:

mysql -u root -p

This will prompt you for a password, so enter your MariaDB root password and hit Enter. Once you are logged in to your database server you need to create a database for Adminer installation:

USE mysql;
ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'password';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
exit;

Step 4. Installing Adminer on Ubuntu 18.04.

We download the latest Adminer into our Apache web servers root folder:

sudo mkdir /usr/share/adminer
sudo wget "http://www.adminer.org/latest.php" -O /usr/share/adminer/latest.php
sudo ln -s /usr/share/adminer/latest.php /usr/share/adminer/adminer.php
echo "Alias /adminer.php /usr/share/adminer/adminer.php" | sudo tee /etc/apache2/conf-available/adminer.conf
sudo a2enconf adminer.conf

Restart Apache for the changes to take effect using the following command:

sudo systemctl reload apache2

Step 5. Accessing Adminer.

Adminer will be available on HTTP port 80 by default. Open your favorite browser and navigate to http://your-domain.com/adminer or http://your-server-ip-address/adminer.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Adminer. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing Adminer on your Ubuntu 18.04 LTS system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Adminer website.