Getting Started with phpMyAdmin - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management - page 10

In most cases, the icons beside each parameter point to the respective phpMyAdmin
official wiki and to the documentation, providing you with more information about
this parameter and its possible values.
If Show hidden messages appears and we click on this link, messages that might
have been shown earlier are revealed.
There are three warnings here. As taking care of the first message will require more
manipulations, we will handle it in a moment. The second warning encourages you
to use the ForceSSL option, which would automatically switch to HTTPS when
using phpMyAdmin (not related to the setup phase).
Let us cover the third message— Insecure connection . This message appears if we
are accessing the web server over HTTP—an insecure protocol. As we are possibly
going to input confidential information, such as the user name and password in the
setup phase, it's recommended that you communicate over HTTPS at least for this
phase. HTTPS uses SSL ( Secure Socket Layer ) to encrypt the communication and
make eavesdropping on the line impossible. If our web server supports HTTPS, we
can simply follow the proposed link. It will restart the setup process, this time over
HTTPS.
The first warning tells us that phpMyAdmin did not find a writable directory with
the name config . This is normal as it was not present in the downloaded kit. Also, as
the directory is not yet there, we observe that the Save , Load, and Delete buttons in
the interface are grey. In this config directory, we can:
• Save the working version of the coniguration ile during the setup process
• Load a previously prepared config.inc.php ile
It's not absolutely necessary that we create this configuration directory, as we can
download the config.inc.php file produced by the setup procedure to our client
machine. We can then upload it to phpMyAdmin in the first-level directory through
the same mechanism (say, FTP) that we used to upload phpMyAdmin. For this
exercise, we will create this directory.
The principle here is that the web server must be able to write to this directory.
There is more than one way to achieve this. Here is one that would work on a Linux
server—adding read, write, and execute permissions for everyone on this directory.
cd phpMyAdmin
mkdir config
chmod 777 config