Introduction and Installation - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management - page 15

We then click Save and are brought back to the Overview panel . This save operation
did not yet save anything to disk; changes were saved in memory. We are warned
that a Blowfish secret key was generated. However, we don't have to remember it,
as it's not keyed in during login process, but is used internally. For the curious, you
can switch to the Features panel and click the Security tab to see which secret key
was generated. Back to the Overview panel. Now our setup process knows about
one MySQL server, and there are links that enable us to Edit or Delete these
server settings:
We can have a look at the generated configuration lines by using the Display
button—then we can analyze these parameters using the explanations given in
the Description of some Configuration Parameters section later in this chapter.
At this point, this configuration is still just in memory, so we need to save it. This
is done via the Save button on the Overview panel. It saves config.inc.php in
the special config directory that we created previously. This is a directory strictly
used for configuration purposes. If, for any reason, it was not possible to create this
config directory, you just have to Download the file and upload it to the web sever
directory where phpMyAdmin is installed.
The last step is to copy config.inc.php from the config directory to the top-level
directory—the one that contains index.php . By copying this file, it becomes owned
by the user instead of the web server, ensuring that further modifications are possible.
This copy can be done via FTP or through commands such as:
cd config
cp config.inc.php ..
As a security measure, it's recommended that you change the
permission on the config directory—for example, with the
chmod ugo-rwx config command. This is to block any unauthorized
reading and writing in this directory.