I discovered Adminer a few years ago, when i found that a site i was doing some testing on was hacked into. After looking around trough the server, i discover that the server itself was not compromised but only the database, and after countless hours of digging trough log files i discovered that the hacker had gained access trough a PHPMyAdmin vulnerability.

I like all the features in PHPMyAdmin unfortunately due to its complexity and its wide usage, there are far more vulnerabilities that get discovered.

I discovered Adminer, which had just the functions that i needed without all of the overhead and with a bit more security.

Note:

Adminer is available for install from Ubuntu Repositories using “sudo apt-get install adminer” but to get the latest features we will install the latest version manually.

This Tutorial only works on Ubuntu 14.04.

This tutorial is For Adminer and MYSQL but Adminer also works with the following databases:

  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • SQLite
  • MS SQL
  • Oracle
  • SimpleDB
  • Elasticsearch
  • MongoDB

If you have any questions or comments feel free to post them at the bottom i will be glad to help with any issues.

Install

Step 1
Connect to your server as the admin user via SSH or open a command prompt.

ssh [email protected]

Step 2 We need to install apache2 and mysql-server unless you are installing it on an existing web server.
Update and Upgrade the server

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

Install Apache, PHP and MYSQL Server and some PHP extensions

sudo apt-get install apache2 php5 php5-curl php5-cli php5-mysql php5-gd mysql-client mysql-server

Enter the Mysql password for the root user. Note: For security make this one different than your server’s password, and try not to use this user in any application that requires a database to store and pull data from.

Step 3
We download the latest Adminer into our Apache web servers root folder

sudo mkdir /usr/share/adminer
sudo wget "http://www.adminer.org/latest.php" -O /usr/share/adminer/latest.php
sudo ln -s /usr/share/adminer/latest.php /usr/share/adminer/adminer.php
echo "Alias /adminer.php /usr/share/adminer/adminer.php" | sudo tee /etc/apache2/conf-available/adminer.conf
sudo a2enconf adminer.conf
sudo service apache2 restart

That’s it access te adminer interface at

http://yourdomain.com/adminer.php