How can I access phpMyAdmin without cPanel login?

A common question by many cPanel end users is: How can I access the phpmyadmin interface without the cPanel credentials?

In fact, this has been a feature request by cPanel users, but it has been declined by cPanel development team. However, there is still a workaround to access phpmyadmin without cPanel username and password.

On this tutorial, we will show you how to access MySQL databases of cPane users without login into the cPanel account.

This is most needed when you have a developer working on your web application at database (DB) level, and you don’t want to give him access to the full cPanel account. Instead, the best you can do is to grant access to phpmyadmin only.

In a normal cPanel scenario the default location for phpMyAdmin installation is https://www.yoursite.com:2083/3rdparty/phpMyAdmin/index.php.

If you type that URL in your browser you’ll see that you are going to be prompted for the cPanel user and password. You need cPanel login credentials to login into phpmyadmin. However, therere is a quick fix for that. Let’s see how to login to phpmyadmin without accesing cPanel.

Access phpMyAdmin without cPanel login using an alternative phpMyAdmin

In normal cases, to access the PhpMyAdmin you need the cPanel login credentials. In this post Cr a solution for that problem. You can use the PhpMyAdmin package to access databases separately without knowing the account’s password.

Follow the next steps to install an alternative phpMyAdmin version on your website.

  1. Download phpmyadmin latest version from phpMyAdmin download page, the downloaded file will be something like:

phpMyAdmin-4.x.x-all-languages.zip

2. Extract the downloaded file, it will create a directory called phpMyAdmin-4.6.5.2-all-languages

3. Rename ‘phpMyAdmin-4.6.5.2-all-languages’ to ‘phpmyadmin’

4. Upload the ‘phpmyadmin’ directory to the root of your public_html directory.

How can I test phpmyadmin is working?

Use any MySQL user and password you already created before for any of your web apps. Other way to test it is to login to your cPanel contro panel, move to MYSQL Databases, and create a new mysql database, user and password.  Assign all privileges to the new user.

Login to your new phpmyadmin independent installation by browsing: http://www.yoursite.com/phpmyadmin

phpMyAdmin login page
That’s all, now you can access phpMyAdmin without cPanel login.

About the Author: Esteban Borges

Experienced Sr. Linux SysAdmin and Web Technologist, passionate about building tools, automating processes, fixing server issues, troubleshooting, securing and optimizing high traffic websites.

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