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I fail to understand why PHPmyadmin is forbidden in Nginx

Posted on January 29, 2018

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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Jamie Wilson

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;
    }
}

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.

Bathinda Helper

February 15, 2020

I struck to such a problem/solution, when PhpMyAdmin wasn’t opening in the browser, giving “403 Forbidden nginx/1.14.0 (Ubuntu)” error.

I had just missed ‘index.php’ in the type of files list in the 443/secure https section block. That’s it. Whole day went to find it. Google too was unable to find me this solution.

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