phpMyAdmin is a free and open source administration tool for MySQL and MariaDB. As a portable web application written primarily in PHP, it has become one of the most popular MySQL administration tools, especially for web hosting services.

History

Tobias Ratschiller, then an IT consultant and later founder of the software company Maguma, started to work on a PHP-based web front-end to MySQL in 1998, inspired by MySQL-Webadmin. He gave up the project (and phpAdsNew, of which he was also the original author) in 2000 because of lack of time. By that time, phpMyAdmin had already become one of the most popular PHP applications and MySQL administration tools, with a large community of users and contributors. In order to coordinate the growing number of patches, a group of three developers (Olivier Müller, Marc Delisle and Loïc Chapeaux) registered The phpMyAdmin Project at SourceForge and took over the development in 2001. In July 2015, the main website and the downloads left SourceForge and moved to a content delivery network. At the same time, the releases began to be PGP-signed. Afterwards, issue tracking moved to GitHub and the mailing lists migrated. Before version 4, which uses Ajax extensively to enhance usability, the software used HTML frames.

Features

Features provided by the program include: