During an upgrade of WordPress, I realised it was about time I figured out how to backup my databases. This led to the requirement for phpMyAdmin, and this section.
There doesn’t seem to be any Debian packaging for phpMyAdmin, so I just went to the homepage and downloaded it. It consists of a single tarball that gets extracted into the /var/www document root, and then one configuration file config.inc.php that needs the userid and password of the MySQL administrator entered.
Without some security, this configuration is now wide open for anyone to access the phpMyAdmin system and play with the databases. I solved this by editing the /etc/apache2/sites-available/default configuration file, and inserting the following:
Alias /phpmyadmin/ “/var/www/phpMyAdmin-2.6.1/”
<Directory /var/www/phpMyAdmin-2.6.1/>
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
allow from my ip address
</Directory>