What is a blowfish secret in phpMyAdmin?

Question

About setting up the config.inc.php, the official phpMyAdmin docs says

$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = 'theExampleWrites16ValuesHere';  // use here a value of your choice

What is a blowfish secret? How do I generate, or choose, a value?

Solution 1

Simply use any random string of characters and/or numbers that you like. It is a value that will be unique to your instance and use of phpMyAdmin.

Solution 2

go to /var/lib/phpmyadmin/blowfish_secret.inc.php and add some caracters to be 32 in length like this:

$cfg['blow_secret'] = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx';

save file and refresh phpMyAdmin.

Solution 3

Go to phpMyadmin Directory and open the config file >> /phpMyadmin/config.inc.php

Locate >> $cfg['blowfish_secret'] = ''; / YOU MUST FILL IN THIS FOR COOKIE AUTH! /

Enter a string which should be not less than 32 characters. {You can include Number, Characters&SpecialCharacters} Save and reload the page (//yourdomainname.*/phpmyadmin) and log in again. That should fix the error.

Ref: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PhpMyAdmin#Add_blowfish_secret_passphrase

Thanks and Regards

Solution 4

If you have PHP available, you can add this to a shell script to build out the phpMyAdmin installation:

export SECRET=`php -r 'echo base64_encode(random_bytes(24));'`
echo "\$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = '$SECRET';" \
    >> /path/to/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php

Solution 5

in /usr/share/phpmyadmin/libraries/vendor_config.php the config dir variable might either be empty or missing the trailing slash, change it into:

define('CONFIG_DIR', '/etc/phpmyadmin/'); 

The permission to this temporary directory needs to be set correctly in /usr/share/phpmyadmin/libraries/vendor_config.php. It solved it for me. define('TEMP_DIR', '/var/lib/phpmyadmin/tmp/');

Also if you are missing the Users tab in PhpMyAdmin, it is caused because of insufficient rights. Run GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'myuser'@'%' WITH GRANT OPTION; from the mysql console (your your own administrative username) while logged in with root privileges.

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