MyWebSQL is a powerful web interface designed to help handle all aspects of your MySQL server through a web browser. Made to be fast, easy-to-use, and readily accessible from anywhere, MyWebSQL allows you to keep track on your databases from any location, through any device. And with support for various MySQL servers, you also don’t need to worry about it supporting the one you currently use. If you’re looking for a web management tool, but you need something other than phpMyAdmin, then this is a solid choice to go with. In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MyWebSQL on your CentOS 7 machine or VPS. The installation process is fairly simple, and will not take long.
Step 1: Setting up Prerequisites
In order to complete this tutorial, you will need the following packages installed on your machine/server:
- php
- mysql (or mariadb)
- httpd
- wget
- unzip
In order for MyWebSQL to work, it needs a web server that will serve the website to the browser, allowing you to access it. PHP is required for MyWebSQL to run, since that’s what it’s coded with. The ‘wget’ and ‘unzip’ packages are needed to download and extract the file onto your server. Therefore, you will need to install all of these before being able to continue.
Most importantly, you will need a working MySQL or MariaDB server in order to use MyWebSQL. Keep in mind that your installation of CentOS may come with some or even all of these packages already installed.
In this tutorial, we will use Apache for our webserver. Even though it uses slightly more resources than Nginx, Apache is easier to set up and use. We will also be using MariaDB for the tutorial since it is the most popular choice for CentOS, and it comes included in the default repositories.
Installing all of these packages is very easy when using ‘yum’, since any existing packages don’t get installed again. Running this one command allows any missing packages to install seamlessly. First, we’ll update our server to keep everything up-to-date:
sudo yum -y update
Just run this one command to install any missing packages:
sudo yum install php mariadb httpd wget unzip
Confirm that you would like to install the packages if prompted. After a couple of minutes, the install will be finished, and you can now install MyWebSQL.
Step 2: Downloading the .zip file
In order to install MyWebSQL, we’ll need to download the files onto our server first. We’ll be downloading the most recent version (3.7 at the time of writing this review) of MyWebSQL through SourceForge, the download platform that MyWebSQL recommends. Use the following command to download the .zip file onto your server:
wget https://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/mywebsql/stable/mywebsql-3.7.zip
Once this is done, we will need to unzip the file into our httpd folder. You can unzip the file by entering this command:
unzip mywebsql-3.7.zip -d /var/www/html
After this file is unzipped, the folder ‘mywebsql’ should now exist in the directory /var/www/html. This is all you need to do to get MyWebSQL working on your server. Now, make sure your web server is started and has the new directory loaded by running the following command:
systemctl restart httpd
Now check your website by going to “http://yourdomainhere.com/mywebsql/”. The login page should show up.
Using MyWebSQL
If you ever need to edit some configuration files – for example, changing the theme, editing which MySQL servers are available to edit using the web interface, and so on – this is all possible by simply going to the “config” folder. It’s found at the location /var/www/html/mywebsql/config/. Here, you’ll find several configuration files, each with settings for different aspects of the site.
You have to have your database server set up first before you can use MyWebSQL. It’s mostly simple things, like telling it where the SQL server is located (localhost, other IP address, etc.), the username to log in with, the password, and so on. You need to have a user and password set in the database server first – you’ll use this to log into MyWebSQL. The process varies for whichever SQL database server you’re using. For MariaDB, the most common choice of database server on CentOS, the command is very easy. Just type the following command to set up your server:
mysql_secure_installation
The software will guide you through a few questions regarding how you want your server set up. When done, you simply log into the web interface using the root account and password that you just set, and you can start editing your databases with ease. Creating users is easy, too – by going to Tools > User Manager, you can add, remove, and edit permissions of users, all through a web browser.
Of course, you won’t need to install MyWebSQL yourself if you have a CentOS VPS with us. Simply ask our admins to install it for you, and they will immediately install it. They are available 24/7, and can cater to any requests you may have.
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