Fortrabbit And phpMyAdmin: installation clarification

Question

I've been following the Fortrabbit's guide to install phpMyAdmin.

I've managed to put the folder in my htdocs, but from what I read I must actually upload it into the app root below htdocs. Problem is the app root has write protection and I can't seem to change permissions via SFTP.

Any solutions?

Edit

Solved. I had my Root Path under settings set to htdocs/public, so I couldn't hit the phpMyAdmin folder. Setting the Root Path back to htdocs/ enabled me to access it like normal.

Answer 1

Where did you read it must go to the app root? I don't see that in the tutorial, but admit I may have missed it. Also, I'm not clear what you mean by "app root".

Note that in this case, there are three different 'root' folders, be careful not to get confused.

1. The file system root, /. All the files on your server live here. Depending how fortrabbit configures their system, you may not even have access to this.
2. The web folder root. Files in this folder and below are available online through your webserver.
3. The SFTP root. This also depends on how fortrabbit configures their server, it could be your web root, the file system root, or your home directory. You may be able to change to other folders, or maybe not.

Normally, htdocs is the root or base folder where your webserver is looking for files to serve. It isn't clear from my browsing the fortrabbit site if they do anything odd with their configuration, so this is a close approximation for what most servers look like. For the sake of illustration, we'll pretend that htdocs is in /var but it can be anywhere on disk.

So the file system might look a bit like:

/
/bin/
/etc/
/home/MichaelHanslo/
/home/MichaelHanslo/budget_presentation.odf
/var/
/var/htdocs/
/var/htdocs/index.html
/var/htdocs/pma/
/var/htdocs/calendar/
/var/htdocs/calendar/modify.php
/var/logs/

So in that scenario, going to http://example.com/ loads the file /var/htdocs/index.html, going to http://example.com/calendar/modify.php loads /var/htdocs/calendar/modify.php. So in most cases, you want to create a folder under htdocs for phpMyAdmin; you can call it anything you want (in my example above, I used 'pma'). Anyway, if you don't have permission to create the folder under your web root, then you should definitely ask your host for help, because something isn't right.

Hope that helps clear it up for you.