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 should work on Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04

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 update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Install Apache, PHP and MYSQL Server and some PHP extensions

sudo apt install apache2 php php-curl php-cli php-mysql php-gd mysql-client mysql-server -y

Secure your MySQL installation and set the root password

sudo mysql_secure_installation

From here, you can just press Y and then ENTER to accept the defaults for all the subsequent questions.

Fix authentication issue caused by Ubuntu using auth_socket plugin by default for the root user.
You can set the root user to use the mysql_native_password instead to fix this issue, and we will have to set the root password again to correct this.

log in as sudo to mysql using the username and password set before.

sudo mysql -u root

in MySQL enter the following

USE mysql;

ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'password';

Note:

For security make this password different than your server’s password, and dont use the root user in any application that requires a database to store and pull data from.

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

exit;

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

reload the Apache config

sudo systemctl reload apache2

That’s it access the adminer interface at
http:///adminer.php

admin