100-day Challenge #045: Running phpMyAdmin on Cloud Foundry

Many Cloud Foundry-based services provide free MySQL databases in the form of a built-in service. I’m sure many of you would like to utilize this built-in service for your development work. However, there is a problem that many people face at the outset.

To be specific, it is the issue that the MySQL instance cannot be connected to directly from the outside of Cloud Foundry. In other words, you cannot use the mysql command line tool nor the MySQL Administrator at your fingertips to control the instance.

This could be quite a stumbling block. Unless you have developed a mechanism where you only have to run db migrate with predefined schema migrations like Rails, you cannot proceed with your development while you define tables and columns along the way.

So what can you do? You can turn to phpMyAdmin.

Structure

I’m sure many of you have heard of phpMyAdmin; it is a MySQL client tool that can be used through a Web browser. As you’ve probably guessed from its name, it is written in PHP.

This time, we will deploy it onto Cloud Foundry, with assuming the structure below. By binding to one service instance from both the application in development and phpMyAdmin, we are able to operate MySQL without affecting the application in development

Prior to deploying phpMyAdmin, I have created a mysql service, just like this:

$ cf create-service mysql default php-mysql-dev
OK

Deploying phpMyAdmin

In this deployment, we use a version of phpMyAdmin customized for Cloud Foundry.
https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/phpmyadmin-cf

We can download an archived zip file from the above repository. Let’s unzip it locally,

$ wget https://github.com/cloudfoundry-community/phpmyadmin-cf/archive/cf-ready.zip
$ unzip cf-ready.zip
$ cd phpmyadmin-cf-cf-ready/

.. then push it to Cloud Foundry. (Note: as the buildpack in Cloud(n) PaaS, a Cloud Foundry-based public PaaS used in this post, was dated, I explicitly specified a PHP buildpack with -b)

$ cf push -b https://github.com/cloudfoundry/php-buildpack.git#v3.2.2
Using manifest file /Users/jacopen/Downloads/phpmyadmin-cf-cf-ready/manifest.yml

Updating app phpmyadmin-cfready in org xxxxx / space default as xxxxxxxxxxxx...
OK
(snip)
     state     since                    cpu    memory      disk           details
#0   running   2015-08-02 05:12:42 PM   0.0%   16M of 1G   102.1M of 2G

After pushing, let’s bind the service to the application then restage.

$ cf bind-service phpmyadmin-cfready php-mysql-dev
Binding service php-mysql-dev to app phpmyadmin-cfready in org xxxxxxxxxx / space default as xxxxxxxxxxx...
OK
TIP: Use 'cf restage phpmyadmin-cfready' to ensure your env variable changes take effect
$ cf restage phpmyadmin-cfready
Restaging app phpmyadmin-cfready in org xxxxxxxxxx / space default as xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx..

You will find the default setting of manifest.yml as below. When you would like to change the application name or memory size, you should edit this manifest.yml.

---
#Generated manifest
applications:
- name: phpmyadmin-cfready
  memory: 1G
  instances: 1

It looks like it’s working.

With most services, you can get the username and password for the builtin service through the control panel. Once you get them, go ahead and log in by entering them into phpmyadmin.

It seems that we have succeeded to log in.

And now, we can operate freely the mysql database of the builtin service.

Although there is an authentification process, it is not advisable from a security standpoint to leave phpmyadmin running, so you should either delete or shut down the application once you have finished using it. It is a good point of PaaS that you can easily change the status of an application.