Introduction and Installation - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management - page 12

There are three warnings here. We will first deal with the second one— 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. We have made this
assumption in our example.

The third warning encourages you to use the ForceSSL option, which would
automatically switch to HTTPS when using phpMyAdmin (not related to the
setup phase).

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 configuration file 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 via the
same mechanism (say FTP) that we used to upload phpMyAdmin. In any case, we'll
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