Have you ever found yourself irritated by the time it takes phpMyAdmin to perform functions, or even load?


If you need to quickly check your database, you might find the one-page PHP file application, Adminer, for administration of you MySQL / Maria DB is the solution for you. Adminer has a simple interface that loads quickly. Unlike phpMyAdmin, you can’t click in a cell and edit the value, but you can simply select the table row data and click “Edit” to alter data.

Adminer requires an extra click to edit data, but I’ve saved a lot of time with its fast performance. I don’t do any heavy db admin for my own apps, so Adminer works well for me. I accomplish my tasks faster, and move on to the next project more quickly with less frustration waiting for phpMyAdmin.

The following article is dated, but it provides an overview perspective on Adminer from a programmer’s perspective. Check out, the Architecture of Adminer!

Check it out! Adminer now has a little brother called Editor. Honestly, I’ve checked it out and I haven’t noticed the benefit to me yet, but I did not read the manual. This is what the official website has to say about it:

• Interface to select and edit data ready for your client
• Table and column comments are displayed instead of identifiers
• Separate set of login credentials different from the real database user and password
• Single database per one instance of Editor
• Links to referenced records
• Works with the name of a referenced record, not its ID
• Displays images stored in BLOB
• Displays checkbox and icons for BOOL
• Uses national format for DATE
• Allows sending messages to e-mails found in table
• No edit or display of SQL commands (only in HTML comment)

Get Fancy!

Create a sub directory for storing Adminer files (e.g. localhost/adminer/) and store the main Adminer file as index.php (instead of adminer.php) so poiting to that location will automatically load the index.php file. Then you can store some of these CSS files and change up the appearance of Adminer now and then. Using a file tree like the structure shown, I can just rename those .css files. Get the idea?

/var/www/html/adminer$ tree
.
├── adminer.brade.css
├── adminer.clean_responsive_blue.css
├── adminer.css
├── adminer.css.lukashron
├── adminer.css.off
├── adminer.css.Ph4ntom01
├── adminer.douglasdamasio.css
├── adminer.esterka.css
├── adminer.flat.css
├── adminer.galkaev.css
├── adminer.hever.css
├── adminer.joykalyanguru.css
├── adminer.kahi.css
├── adminer.lucas-sandery.css
├── adminer.lukashron.css
├── adminer.mancave.css
├── adminer.mancave.css:Zone.Identifier
├── adminer.Material.css
├── adminer.midlan.css
├── adminer.mvt.css
├── adminer.nette.css
├── adminer.ng9.css
├── adminer.pappu687.css
├── adminer.pepa-linha.css
├── adminer.pepa-linha-dark.css
├── adminer.Ph4ntom01.css
├── adminer.php
├── adminer.pokorny.css
├── adminer.Rahman.css
├── adminer.rmsoft.css
├── adminer-theme-switcher.php
├── editor.php
├── favicon.ico
├── index.php
├── index.php.not
├── index.php.off
├── index.php.was
├── index.phtml
├── plugins
│   ├── AdminerCollations.php
│   ├── AdminerJsonPreview.php

Go to the Adminer site and download the files for the styles you like. Use a naming convention of adminer.Style-Name.css save the CSS files under the ./adminer directory next to the index.php file (renamed from adminer.php). Keep the .css extension to make it easy to identify those files as stylesheets. Adminer expects the filename adminer.css to be in that directory, so try them each by picking a desired style-name.css and save-as adminer.css (don’t rename). Making a copy (save-as) means the adminer.Style-Name.css file remains, so you can switch back to it easily; test them all quickly without concern for losing the various styles you’ve downloaded.

If you need a more robust experience where you can save queries, store bookmarks (and more additional features than you’ll probably ever need), check out phpMyAdmin. Be sure to select the file containing only your language if that’s all you need. You’ll thank yourself when extracting the .zip file.