After updating from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04, I can't get phpMyAdmin to work.

I followed the instructions here at https://tecadmin.net/how-to-install-...-ubuntu-22-04/

When I enter localhost/phpmyadmin in my browser, I see the phpMyAdmin favicon.ico icon, but no login window.

apache2/error.log has this after I attempt to open phpMyAdmin in the browser:

There is a symlink in /usr/share/phpmyadmin/js/vendor/codemirror/ called lib which points to ../../../../javascript/codemirror/lib which is /usr/share/javascript

The owner of /usr/share/javascript is root.

Should I change the owner of /usr/share/javascript to www-data? Or the group to www-data?

There was no mention of /usr/share/javascript in the tutorial I followed.

There is something wrong here. phpMyadmin zipfile extracts in a directory and doesn't use symlinks outside that directory.

In fact, I have a couple of phpMyadmin instances running in 2 different servers and in none of those there is a symlink /usr/share/phpmyadmin/js/vendor/codemirror/lib
That is a real directory containing 2 files (codemirror.css, codemirror.js)

Thanks for your reply.

Previously, I have downloaded phpmyadmin from their webpage, extracted the zip or tar, then put the directory in my /var/www/html

That works, but I thought, "that's not how it's meant to be." or why would Ubuntu have its own instance of phpmyadmin??

I just checked on the little cloud server: the owner of /usr/share/javascript is root, but I can access MySQL using phpmyadmin on the cloud server.

Also, the set-up is very different. root is the owner of everything in /usr/share/phpmyadmin and /usr/share/javascript

I changed the owner of /usr/share/javascript

Hope that won't cause any other problems on my laptop.

Now I can access MySQL from my browser using: localhost/phpmyadmin

I don't use ubuntu but looks like /usr/share/javascript is a system package, so you shouldn't change its ownership.
Look here for details.

Thanks for the link!

/etc/apache2/conf-available has javascript-common.conf, which is as below:

And /etc/apache2/conf-enabled has a symlink to /etc/apache2/conf-available

Also, /usr/share/nodejs contains files need by apache2 for use with phpmyadmin, but that was not a fatal error, phpadmin still started, but I also changed the owner there to www-data.

After I changed the owner from root to www-data, I don't get any errors from apache2 when starting phpmyadmin.

I don't know what other programmes apart from apache2 and phpmyadmin might want to use javascript.

If I get a problem, then I will have to deal with it. I haven't noticed any problem so far.

This is not a server set-up, just my laptop. The set-up on my little cloud server seems very different, but that is Ubuntu 20.04 Server edition.

Anyway, thanks for the advice!

I asked the same question on stackoverflow. One of the phpadmin package maintainers gave me this link:

Specifically, this option in the php apache.conf file should fix the problem of a symlink to a directory not accessible to www-data, according to package maintainer William Desportes

I have not tried this yet, because phpmyadmin is working, and our new term is coming up, I need it working!