I wanted to try out Amazon Aurora RDS so I signed up for the free tier account. This post gives the steps I followed to configure phpMyAdmin running on a different VPS to connect to my Amazon Aurora RDS instance. I wrote this up because I struggled as most of the pages I found were outdated and not much help.
Amazon RDS Configuration
On the Amazon AWS Security Groups settings page you need to add the IP address of the server on which phpMyAdmin is installed. This is necessary so Amazon RDS can accept connections from your server. If you adding a single address you need to add /32 at the end of your IP address. Quoting the example on Amazon’s documentation site 203.0.113.25 should be specified as 203.0.113.25⁄32. Below are screen grabs of the settings pages.
Click on the Edit button to add IP addresses.
Add rule enables you to enter single IP address of IP range.
phpMyAdmin Configuration
To generate the configuration file for phpMyAdmin, version 4.4.14 at the time of writing, I used the built in set up page. To access this page navigate to
url_to_phpMyadmin/setup/index.php.
You will be able to generate a valid configuration file. This utility will not update your configuration file. It will generate a correctly structured config file you can download or copy to your clipboard. For security reasons, the phpMyAdmin documentation advises to remove the setup directory from phpMyAdmin after initial set up. You will have to SSH into your server and update the phpMyAdmin config file using Vim or your preferred text editor. I added my Amazon RDS as a server along with the local server.
Add server to add all the servers you want to connect to.
Add the server details including URL or IP address.
You should be good to go. I find phpMyAdmin very efficient at certain tasks including exploring a database and running the odd SQL query. The fact that it is accessible from the web is a bonus. When I am doing intensive SQL development I will use one of these Open Source SQL editors.