phpmyadmin has been installed and working fine for months, installed via this repo:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tuxpoldo/phpmyadmin/ubuntu utopic main
Suddenly, I couldn't login; no in-page errors but the logs showed:
PHP message: phpmyadmin: Failed to load /etc/phpmyadmin/config-db.php Check group www-data has read access and open_basedir restrictions"
PHP message: phpmyadmin: Failed to load /var/lib/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php Check group www-data has read access and open_basedir restrictions"
So, I checked:
ll /etc/phpmyadmin
drwxrwxr-x 3 www-data www-data 4096 Nov 16 20:11 ./
drwxr-xr-x 132 root root 12288 Nov 17 15:33 ../
-rw-r----- 1 www-data www-data 549 Nov 16 20:11 config-db.php
and
ll /var/lib/phpmyadmin
drwxr-xr-x 4 www-data www-data 4096 Oct 8 15:51 ./
drwxr-xr-x 62 root root 4096 Nov 12 13:10 ../
-rw-r----- 1 www-data www-data 4478 Nov 16 19:48 config.inc.php
I followed this SO answer and changed the user and group permissions to match the example (user:root, group:www-data) and changed the directory permissions to match.
I double, triple checked that no open-basedir restrictions are in effect, and I checked phpinfo()
I tried changing the permissions to be that of the fpm worker pool.
I rebooted.
I did an sudo apt-get install --reinstall phpmyadmin.
The ONLY thing I've done inbetween is to follow this guide to installing freePBX, and 90% of what it wanted was on my machine anyway; only things like sqlite were installed, and I can't even be sure it was that which stopped it working. Long shot, but perhaps worth mentioning.
Everything else, all other sites etc, are running fine. Before I lose any more hair than I have done in the last 5 hours, I'd really appreciate some ideas. Thanks!
Turns out this is a rather misleading message from phpmyadmin:
Check group www-data has read access and open_basedir restrictions.
But anyone running multiple sites, using php-fpm and concerned at all about security will have separate pools for each site.
The solution, in my particular case was:
chown -R phpma:phpma /var/lib/phpmyadmin
chown -R phpma:phpma /etc/phpmyadmin
chown -R phpma:phpma /usr/share/phpmyadmin
Then sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow phpmyadmin
Incidentally, it appears that doing a package install on Ubuntu splatters files all over the place, and it goes a little something like this:
/etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php
includes the following files in this order, which really won't need touching unless you want to up the login cookie validity.
/var/lib/phpmyadmin/blowfish_secret.inc.php // self explanatory
/var/lib/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php // LoginCookieValidity etc
/etc/phpmyadmin/config-db.php // Leave this one alone
/usr/share/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php // auth, host, connection etc
I hope this helps someone else at any rate.