Untar or unzip the distribution (be sure to unzip the subdirectories): tar -xzvf phpMyAdmin_x.x.x.tar.gz in your webserver's document root. If you don't have direct access to your document root, put the files in a directory on your local machine, and, after step 3, transfer the directory on your web server using, for example, ftp.
2. Ensure that all the scripts have the appropriate owner (if PHP is running in safe mode, having some scripts with an owner different from the owner of other scripts will be a problem). See FAQ 4.2 and FAQ 1.26 for suggestions.
3. Create the file config.inc.php in the main (top-level) directory (the one that contains index.php). You can use setup script provided in distribution (scripts/setup.php) to create basics of config file. See Setup chapter for details. If you don't like setup or want to fine tune resulting configuration, open (or create in case of starting from scratch) config.inc.php in your favorite editor and fill in there values for host, user, password and authentication mode to fit your environment. Look at libraries/config.default.php how these fields should be defined. Here, "host" means the MySQL server. Have a look at Configuration section for an explanation of all values. Please also read the remaining of this Installation section for information about authentication modes and the linked-tables infrastructure.
4. If you are using the auth_type configuration directive, it is suggested that you protect the phpMyAdmin installation directory, for example with HTTPAUTH in a .htaccess file. See the multiuser subsection of this FAQ for additional information, especially FAQ 4.4.
5. Open the file <www.your-host.com>/<your-install-dir>/index.php in your browser. phpMyAdmin should now display a welcome screen and your databases, or a login dialog if using HTTP or cookie authentication mode.
6. You should deny access to the libraries subfolder in your webserver configuration. For Apache you can use supplied .htaccess file in that folder, for other webservers, you should configure this yourself. Such configuration prevents from possible path exposure and cross side scripting vulnerabilities that might happen to be found in that code.
Setup script usage
Since 2.8.0 phpMyAdmin comes with a setup script that can help you with creating configuration. This script is located in scripts folder: scripts/setup.php. Its usage is quite simple. You follow the dialogs and this script prepares in memory the configuration directives. You then have two choices for saving the configuration file:
1. Download it to your local workstation, then upload (for example with ftp) to your main phpMyAdmin directory. In this case, you don't have to prepare a special config directory, so no further actions are necessary.
2. Save the file to your webserver into config directory.
For saving file on webserver, or loading previous configuration you have to create config directory in phpMyAdmin's top level directory and make it writable to web server. For loading previous configuration, place it there (and make sure it has write permissions for webserver). On a Linux/UNIX server you can use the following commands:
cd phpMyAdmin
mkdir config # create directory for saving
chmod o+rw config # give it world writable permissions
# if you want to edit existing configuration:
cp config.inc.php config/ # copy current configuration
chmod o+w config/config.inc.php # give it world writable permissions
On a Windows system, create a config in the main phpMyAdmin directory and ensure that your web server has read/write access to it. FAQ 1.26 can help you about this. If you already have an existing config.inc.php in your main directory, copy it to the newly created config directory.
Then you can open scripts/setup.php in your browser and perform setup. After saving your configuration move generated configuration to top level directory and delete created config directory. Do not forget to remove world write permissions on config.inc.php!
Please note that it does not allow to configure everything, so for some additional features you still need to manually edit the configuration file.