IIS Aid

Now that you have installed and configured PHP 5 for IIS along with your MYSQL 5 Server, it's time to start doing something useful with it. And where better to start the the enormously useful phpMyAdmin tool written in PHP to manage just about all things MySQL via a web interface. phpMyAdmin is the veritable swiss army knife for all your MySQL administration needs, all conveniently package in a easy to use web interface. Don't just take my word for it, phpMyAdmin just won best Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins in this years Sourceforge Community Choice Awards. You get the idea then, it is pretty good. In this guide we'll show you how to install and configure phpMyAdmin 3.x in your IIS environment. This guide assumes that you have already installed and configured PHP and MySQL which are required for phpMyAdmin to work. If not, then these guides can be found in the "How To Guides" section of this site.

Installation

First thing to do after you download and extract phpMyAdmin is place the extracted files in the appropriate directory inside your IIS web root so that IIS is able to access it. You may wish to create a separate website for your phpMyAdmin installation, or simply add it as a sub directory or virtual directory under an existing website. Either way you'll need to make sure that the user account used by IIS to access your files has at least NTFS read permissions to all of your files once they are in place.

In this guide we'll place the phpMyAdmin files in a directory called "pma" under the root directory of a website "example.com". Because phpMyAdmin enables you to directly manipulate, and even delete entire databases and users, it is highly recommended that you secure your phpMyAdmin installation using SSL. This can be done by purchasing a certificate from a 3rd party vendor which will cost money, or by creating self signed certificate for IIS yourself at no cost. With all this in mind, then to access the phpMyAdmin installation used in this guide you would type the following into the address bar of your favourite web browser;

https://example.com/pma

Obviously you'd need to alter this URL to reflect your own installation.

PHP Settings

phpMyAdmin uses several PHP extensions to perform its various functions. The extensions you'll need for phpMyAdmin are;

• MySQL (to connect to the MySQL server on my web hosting)
• MCrypt (highly recommended for performance when using the cookie authentication method, and actually required for 64-bit environments)
• MBString (used for multi-byte character support)
• GD2 (image creation and manipulation library)

To enable these extensions open you php.ini file and navigate to the list of extensions and find these extension names;

Simply remove the semi-colon (;) from that start, save the file and restart IIS to reload your PHP environment. These extensions should now be loaded into your PHP environment, and can be verified using the phpinfo function as described in the PHP installation guide.