Can’t Login to phpMyAdmin After Upgrading to Ubuntu 12.04 from 10.04

A confusing point for almost everyone who starts using mysql is that 'root' and 'root@localhost' are two different roles and as such could (and some would argue that they actually should) have different passwords. It is quite possible you are trying to log-in as user 'root@localhost' and you are providing the password for 'root' role.

If this is the case, you can remedy it quite easily. Log-in to the database server using the CLI tool mysql as user root like this:

mysql --user=root --password

The tool will ask for your root password (not system root but database root). Now you can modify the password of 'root'@'localhost' like this:

UPDATE mysql.user SET Password=PASSWORD('cleartext password')
  WHERE User='root' AND Host='localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Now try to log-in through phpMyAdmin using the newly set password.

Create a link in /var/www like this:

sudo ln -s /usr/share/phpmyadmin /var/www/

Note: since 14.04 you may want to use /var/www/html/ instead of /var/www/

If that's not working for you, you need to include PHPMyAdmin inside apache configuration.

Open apache.conf using your favorite editor, mine is vim :)

sudo vim /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Then add the following line:

Include /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf

For Ubuntu 15.04 and 16.04

• sudo ln -s /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf /etc/apache2/conf-available/phpmyadmin.conf
• sudo a2enconf phpmyadmin.conf
• sudo service apache2 reload