Error in phpMyAdmin after updating to v4.8.0: The $cfg['TempDir'] (./tmp/) is not accessible

Question

phpMyAdmin worked fine with v4.7.9. Now after updating to v4.8.0 today (replacing the old phpmyadmin folder against the new one) I\'m getting this mess

Answer 1

I had this same problem on Ubuntu 18.04 when I replaced the phpMyAdmin version from the package repository (v4.6.6) with the latest version (4.8.0). I don't know if you are running on Ubuntu, but maybe my response will be helpful to you (or others) who encounter something similar.

I put the new version in the standard location, /usr/share/phpmyadmin/, but Ubuntu's package installation of PMA puts some configuration settings in other places (see /etc/phpmyadmin/ and /var/lib/phpmyadmin/). I found this setting in /etc/phpmyadmin/apache.conf:

php_admin_value upload_tmp_dir /var/lib/phpmyadmin/tmp

and sure enough that directory had been created and had the proper permissions. Wanting to stay as close as possible to the package installation settings, I made this change in /usr/share/phpmyadmin/libraries/vendor_config.php and pointed directly to that folder:

//define('TEMP_DIR', './tmp/');
define('TEMP_DIR', '/var/lib/phpmyadmin/tmp/');

This setting is picked up by /usr/share/phpmyadmin/libraries/config.default.php (which you are not supposed to edit) to set $cfg['TempDir'].