Why can't PHPMyAdmin write to my config directory on my AWS Ubuntu 12.04 LTS instance?

Question

I know that this is a very common question to find asked, but I'm having serious difficulty with this on my AWS Ubuntu 12.04 instance.

I installed PHPMyAdmin using apt-get with the command sudo apt-get install phpmyadmin and it installed just fine. I can use PHPMyAdmin as it is on the instance.

I'm trying to generate a config file using the setup wizard, and I followed the steps as documented on the PHPMyAdmin website to set that up. I created the config directory in /usr/share/phpmyadmin and gave it world write access using sudo chmod 777 config . Despite all of this, PHPMyAdmin still tells me that my config directory is not writable.

I then tried to create a config directory in /etc/phpmyadmin which also had world write access and I'm still not having any luck!

Can anyone please tell me if I'm missing something here? I don't know what else I can try to get this working.

Answer 1

I found it!

My config directory is actually /var/lib/phpmyadmin .

I found this from the index.lib.php file in /usr/share/phpmyadmin/setup/lib . There's a function in there called check_config_rw() which checks the Config directory based on the currently used config.inc.php file. Changing the permissions on this folder and its contents to make it www-data writable solved my problem!