adminer-setup.md

Adminer Setup

Adminer is a great tool for managing many different kinds of databases. It is easy to set up and easy to use. In this tutorial, I'll be showing you how to set it up locally on your computer.

This tutorial is made specifically for Ubuntu and other Debian-based systems, however, with few adjustments, it can be made to work on other Linux distributions. Ok, let's get started.

sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/share/adminer

Grab the latest version of Adminer and save it to the directory we just created:

sudo wget -O /usr/local/share/adminer/adminer.php https://www.adminer.org/latest.php

Create an index.php file with an include statement pointing to adminer.php. We will reference index.php in our nginx configuration file.

<?php
include "./adminer.php";

If you haven't already, install nginx. Create an nginx config file, adminer.test, in /etc/nginx/sites-available/:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name adminer.test;
    root /usr/local/share/adminer/;

    # If you want to use a .htpass file, uncomment the three following lines.
    #auth_basic "Admin-Area! Password needed!";
    #auth_basic_user_file /usr/local/share/adminer/.htpass;
    #access_log /var/log/nginx/adminer.test-access.log;

    error_log /var/log/nginx/adminer.test-error.log;
    location / {
        index index.php;
        try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?$args;
    }

    location ~ \.php$ {
        include fastcgi.conf;
        fastcgi_pass unix:/run/php/php8.0-fpm.sock;
        fastcgi_index index.php;
    }
}

Enable the config:

ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/adminer.test /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/adminer.test

Restart nginx to register the changes.

sudo systemctl restart nginx.service

To access adminer from http://adminer.test, add adminer.test at the end of the line which binds 'localhost' to the loopback address in the /etc/hosts file:

127.0.0.1 localhost adminer.test

Now open a browser and type the http://adminer.test. You should be see the Adminer login page.

To access Adminer via http://localhost/adminer, create a symlink of the adminer directory to the web root:

ln -s /usr/local/share/adminer /var/www/html/

NOTE
Ensure that the extensions for all the databases you want to use are enabled in your php.ini configuration file. Eg.

extension=pdo_mysql
extension=mysqli

Updating Adminer

To keep adminer up-to-date, create a script named update-adminer:

echo 'wget -O adminer.php http://www.adminer.org/latest.php' > update-adminer
chmod +x update-adminer
sudo mv update-adminer /usr/local/share/adminer/

Run the script in the Adminer root directory whenever you want to retrieve the latest version of Adminer.

sudo /usr/local/share/adminer/update-adminer

That's it.

As a bonus, If you use Laravel and the tool Valet, setting up Adminer is as simple as creating a directory, adminer, with theadminer.php, index.php and update-adminer files. Valet will handle serving the application at http://adminer.test. Secure domains are also supported and handled automatically (eg. https://adminer.test).