PhpMyAdmin not Working

Posted on September 11, 2016

I have set up phpmyadmin for my droplet. It was working fine last night, but as of today I keep getting an error.

I followed this tutorial: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-and-secure-phpmyadmin-on-ubuntu-16-04

Image and code of the error:

Warning in ./libraries/session.inc.php#105
 session_start(): open(/var/lib/php/sessions/sess_d4ird29f4per3ljp2li7prhniljibmk4, O_RDWR) failed: Permission denied (13)

Backtrace

./libraries/session.inc.php#105: session_start()
./libraries/common.inc.php#357: require(./libraries/session.inc.php)
./index.php#12: require_once(./libraries/common.inc.php)

I am accessing it via http://000.000.0.000/phpmyadmin/

I have tried clearing my cookies and that is not fixing it either.

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Ryan Quinn

September 12, 2016

Accepted Answer

I would check that your phpmyadmin installation has the proper permissions (should be owned by www-data if it’s not). It sounds like the server-side files written for the php session cannot be properly written. I’ve encountered something similar before and before digging deeper I would recommend doing a reboot of your droplet. Temporary files in /tmp are cleared out on reboot and this would likely be the cleanest way to resolve this problem. I would then review file permissions and check your log files for any other potential errors that could point to an underlying cause.