Installing Adminer on Ubuntu 16.04

20 May 2016 - by 'Maurits van der Schee'

As I wrote two years ago and four years ago: Adminer is a very good alternative to PHPMyAdmin. I often find myself looking up those old posts, because I frequently install, recommend or update Adminer. After using this software daily for several years I can say without a doubt that it is much better than PHPMyAdmin. Adminer is constantly updating and adding nice new features without changing dramatically and alienating it's users. The top 3 reasons why I use Adminer are:

Very clear and consistent user interface
It automatically adds foreign keys
You can easily reorder columns in a table

I'm sure that once you give it a try, you will be sold as well and never look back!

Installation / Updating / De-installation

To install, open a terminal and run the following commands:

sudo mkdir /usr/share/adminer
sudo wget "https://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

To update, run the following command:

sudo wget "https://www.adminer.org/latest.php" -O /usr/share/adminer/latest.php

And for de-installation, run these:

sudo a2disconf adminer.conf
sudo service apache2 restart
sudo rm /etc/apache2/conf-available/adminer.conf
sudo rm -Rf /usr/share/adminer

Easy ain't it?

Adminer editor

When creating software I tend to start at the data model. I create the data model using Adminer. When I need to quickly prototype an admin backend I tend to install Adminer editor (also downloadable from the Adminer website). I have had some great success with it where, after styling, the customer accepted the Adminer editor UI as the final admin backed. I modified an existing stylesheet from the Adminer website to match the company colors and added the company logo. This saved lots of time and both parties were extremely satisfied.

The only thing I was missing from the Adminer editor is an authorization model. That's why I created PHP-CRUD-UI, a front-end to PHP-CRUD-API. This allows you to specify authorization rules using callbacks in the API. Since this is very much work-in-progress it may not yet be a viable alternative to Adminer editor, but if you like the idea, then feel free to contribute!

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TQ
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