How do I update phpMyAdmin in Ubuntu?

Question

I have an old phpMyAdmin installation (contains my training and jobs data). I want to update it to the latest version and I want to keep my data safe while updating it. Is there any way to do it by running some commands on the terminal? Is my data erased if I uninstall phpMyAdmin?

Answer 1

Here is how to upgrade/downgrade on Ubuntu.

Note: The following instruction only works if you previously (and correctly) installed phpMyAdmin with the command line and use APACHE as a web server.

I suppose that you already have a working phpMyAdmin, but the version isn't the one you want. For instance, Ubuntu is shipping the 4.6.x version which doesn't work properly with PHP 7.2.

1. Check the version you want on:

   https://www.phpmyadmin.net/files/

2. On your server

   cd /usr/share/
   rm -rf phpmyadmin
   

   then adapt this line with the correct version number

   wget https://files.phpmyadmin.net/phpMyAdmin/4.8.0/phpMyAdmin-4.8.0-all-languages.zip
   unzip phpMyAdmin-4.8.0-all-languages.zip
   rm phpMyAdmin-4.8.0-all-languages.zip
   mv phpMyAdmin-4.8.0-all-languages phpmyadmin
   

   Note: If unzip don't work, install it with: sudo apt-get install unzip

3. Check permissions

   Now you should be good.

   The owner of /usr/share/phpmyadmin should be root:root on a default installation. This should be fine but if you face some permissions issues, you can try to let Apache be the owner:

   # only if you have permissions issues
   chown -R www-data:www-data /usr/share/phpmyadmin
   chmod -R 755 /usr/share/phpmyadmin
   

   You can also restart Apache

   sudo service apache2 reload
   

4. Troubleshooting

   Note: Depending on your PHP version, you may need to install additional libraries.

   For example, to resolve the error about missing mysqli and mysql extensions (update the command to reflect your PHP version):

   sudo apt-get install php5.6-mysql