Adminer: good alternative for phpMyAdmin

NB: This is an outdated post. New Ubuntu versions use Apache 2.4 instead of Apache 2.2. You can find updated instructions that apply to Ubuntu 14.04 in a new post!

It is not a secret that do a lot of Symfony programming at LeaseWeb. Most of the projects are PHP based and use MySQL as a database. This posts describes a gem that many experienced PHP programmers have not yet heard of.

During software development you often need a tool to quickly search the database, add a column or change a value. Most PHP developers know that phpMyAdmin is a good tool that can provide you with easy access, but only a few know that there is really good alternative for this tool called “Adminer“.

In my opinion Adminer has the advantage that it has a better user experience, but this is not the only advantage it has (or may have). According to the Adminer website there is a long list of reasons why Adminer is better than phpMyAdmin.

If you are really fond of Adminer, you might want to install it in the same way phpMyAdmin is installed. Since it is not yet part of the standard Ubuntu repositories you might want to install it manually. Here are the commands you need for installation (on a Debian based system):

$ sudo su
# mkdir /usr/share/adminer
# cd /usr/share/adminer
# wget "http://www.adminer.org/latest.php"
# ln -s latest.php adminer.php
# echo "Alias /adminer.php /usr/share/adminer/adminer.php" > /etc/apache2/conf.d/adminer.conf
# service apache2 restart
# exit
$

Once it is installed and you want to update it (it wil indicate when a new version is available):

$ sudo su
# cd /usr/share/adminer
# wget "http://www.adminer.org/latest.php"
# exit
$

To uninstall it:

$ sudo su
# rm -R /usr/share/adminer
# rm /etc/apache2/conf.d/adminer.conf
# service apache2 restart
# exit
$

Try it out and let me know whether you like it or not.