I fail to understand why PHPmyadmin is forbidden in Nginx

January 29, 2018 11.1k views
Nginx Ubuntu 16.04
benqzq
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benqzq

I fail to understand why entrance to PHPmyadmin is forbidden (http://my_ip/phpmyadmin). Here’s what I did to install it:

On a pure Ubuntu 16.04 machine (server, xenial) I’ve installed LEMP this way (MySQL root password setted on install):

apt-get update -y
apt-get upgrade nginx mysql-server php-fpm php-mysql -y

I then installed PMA:

DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive apt-get upgrade phpmyadmin php-mbstring php-mcrypt php-gettext -y
ln -s /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ /var/www/html/
chown -R www-data:www-data /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ /var/www/html
chmod -R a-x,a=rX,u+w /usr/share/phpmyadmin/ /var/www/html

As said, when navigating to (http://my_ip/phpmyadmin) I get “Forbidden (403)” HTTP status code.

I really fail to understand what’s wrong from the error log:

directory index of “/var/www/html/phpmyadmin/” is forbidden

Hence I ask what might be the problem?

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3 Answers
jwilson January 29, 2018

Hi benqzq. I see you’re using NGINX on the server as well. Could NGINX be preventing you from seeing it?

If you add something like this to your nginx.conf you should be able to open up access to it:

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name myapp.com;

    location / {
        root /phpmyadmin;
        allow your-public-ip;
    }
}
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  • benqzq January 29, 2018

    Hi, thanks,

    I thought about creating a conf but I’d like to avoid that. That’s why I’ve installed PHPmyadmin directly from the repositories (I thought it would redundant creating a conf).

    I’m sad to know a conf file must be created (the task becomes less automatic because I then need to isolate my IP for each droplet, and paste that into the conf, which makes the process less minimal by itself).

  • benqzq January 30, 2018

    In another droplet I tried to use a similar conf but had no luck. Also, somehow an index.php file was created in my document root and at that time I could access PMA without the conf.

    In another droplet I had the same problem and I’ve tried to write in the start of the nginx.conf (in the start of the http block) index index.php index.html;.

    I swear, I can’t understand why using PMA should be so complicated in Nginx…

benqzq January 30, 2018

Strange, I can suddenly access PMA login screen without WSOD and without any problem, from any browser.

Without any Nginx conf file added…

There might have been a bug fixed in the background after some apt-get update && apt-get upgrade or after some upgrade by unattended-upgrades.

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  • jwilson January 30, 2018

    That is strange, but I’m glad you’ve got it working!

    • benqzq January 30, 2018

      Dear @jwilson please delete this “answer”. I am wrong in my approach here and the problem repeats itself in other droplets so the problem must be isolated.

sancsoftmjt January 31, 2019

Stumbled across this thread while setting up a LEMP 18.04LTS snapshot. It seemsto match my problem. Turned out I didn’t have index.php defined as a supported index in the site config

index index.php index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

Makes sense as if it can’t find an index it will try to show directory contents, which is forbidden.

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