What is a blowfish secret in phpMyAdmin?

Question

About setting up the config.inc.php, the official phpMyAdmin docs says

$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = 'theExampleWrites16ValuesHere';  // use here a value of your choice

What is a blowfish secret? How do I generate, or choose, a value?

Answer 1

Simply use any random string of characters and/or numbers that you like. It is a value that will be unique to your instance and use of phpMyAdmin.

Answer 2

go to /var/lib/phpmyadmin/blowfish_secret.inc.php and add some caracters to be 32 in length like this:

$cfg['blow_secret'] = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';

save file and refresh phpMyAdmin.

Answer 3

Go to phpMyadmin Directory and open the config file >> /phpMyadmin/config.inc.php

Locate >> $cfg['blowfish_secret'] = ''; / YOU MUST FILL IN THIS FOR COOKIE AUTH! /

Enter a string which should be not less than 32 characters. {You can include Number, Characters&SpecialCharacters} Save and reload the page (//yourdomainname.*/phpmyadmin) and log in again. That should fix the error.

Ref: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PhpMyAdmin#Add_blowfish_secret_passphrase

Thanks and Regards

Answer 4

If you have PHP available, you can add this to a shell script to build out the phpMyAdmin installation:

export SECRET=`php -r 'echo base64_encode(random_bytes(24));'`
echo "\$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = '$SECRET';" \
    >> /path/to/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php