zhanang19/installing-phpmyadmin-on-subdomain.md

## installing-phpmyadmin-on-subdomain.md

      
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              installing-phpmyadmin-on-subdomain.md
            
          
    Installing PHPMyAdmin on a subdomain

I was recently tasked with adding PHPMyAdmin to one of our LAMP servers for a
3rd party with little/no ssh knowledge to use in order to access the MySQL
database(s). This gist documents how I configured PHPMyAdmin on the LAMP server
on a subdomain with an SSL.
Prerequisites

Before following this guide, it is assumed that you already have a LAMP server up
and running, if not perhaps try following
this guide
to setup a server.
Please also ensure that you have setup your subdomain record (CNAME/A record
depending on domain configuration) and pointed it at your server, making sure
that it has propagated and responds to a ping or lookup test.
Installation

Switch to the root user or a sudo user depending on your setup.
apt-get install phpmyadmin php-mbstring php-gettext
phpenmod mcrypt mbstring
service apache2 restart
The above will start the installation process for PHPMyAdmin along with a couple
of associated php modules.
During the installation, you will be asked if you want to use dbconfig-common
to setup a database, select yes here. You will also be asked to set a password
for this database (the PHPMyAdmin database for the application), ensure you take
note of this password if you do not already have any other mysql users and/or
database setup.
PHPMyAdmin will now be accessible via your primary domain at /phpmyadmin or at
least it should be, there are a couple of caveats with this. For example when
running on a WordPress enabled site, the RewriteEngine in the WordPress
.htaccess will likely block access to /phpmyadmin as it will be looking for
page with a slug of phpmyadmin.
This is another good reason for configuring
PHPMyAdmin on a subdomain as it removes the need to tweak any of the rewrite
rules.
Configuration

Apache

First, we need to setup an apache site (vhost) that can handle the subdomain
routing to the PHPMyAdmin installation. Create a new file in your
/etc/apache2/sites-available/ directory i.e. database.yourdomain.com.conf
and add the following setup:
<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin email@yourdomain.com
    ServerName database.yourdomain.com
    DocumentRoot /usr/share/phpmyadmin

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/phpmyadmin-error.log
    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/phpmyadmin-access.log combined

    ModPagespeed Off
    
    #Redirect permanent / https://database.yourdomain.com
    
</VirtualHost>
Note that if you are not using the Google Pagespeed Module on your server you
can remove the ModPagespeed Off rule.
Also make sure to leave the Redirect permanent rule commented for now, we'll
come back to this later.
Once this is done, you can activate your new site config:
a2ensite database.yourdomain.com.conf
service apache2 reload
You will now be able to visit database.yourdomain.com and see the PHPMyAdmin
login screen. You could leave this setup alone now if you wanted but bare in
mind that this is now an active gateway to your MySQL database. Whilst we have
masked the PHPMyAdmin installation behind a subdomain making it difficult for
someone to just guess the url i.e. /phpmyadmin, it would be better if it was
at least running with an SSL over HTTPS, so we'll set that up below.
Note: We could also add an htaccess login to this subdomain to further increase
security to the database admin, however, depending on your use-case, the SSL
configuration on a subdomain may well suffice.
SSL Configuration

We'll use Letsencrypt as our SSL provider, see
this gist
for instuctions on how to install the SSL.
Before you run the SSL registration command, as documented in the gist above,
ensure you have amended the webroot-path to the PHPMyAdmin install:
certbot certonly --webroot --webroot-path /usr/share/phpmyadmin --renew-by-default -d database.yourdomainhere.com
Once this has been installed, you can now return to your Apache vhost file to
add the SSL config, again as documented in the gist above, ensuring you change
the document path to /usr/share/phpmyadmin. You can at this stage also
uncomment the Redirect permanent line in your vhost config.
Before you restart/reload apache with the ssl changes, we need to enforce SSL
mode for PHPMyAdmin, follow the commands below to complete the setup:
Add $cfg['ForceSSL'] = true; to the bottom of /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php
then restart apache service apache2 restart
You will now see that when navigating to database.yourdomain.com, it will
redirect to https with a valid Letsencrypt SSL powering it and once logged
into PHPMyAdmin, all actions are now performed over HTTPS.