Linking MySQL Workbench to my Remote Server

Question

I\'ve just downloaded MySQL Workbench.

But I don\'t quite understand how to syn this with the databases on my remote server.

Work bench asks for \"hostname\" so

Answer 1

Your phpMyAdmin seems to run on the same server as the database itself.

Therefore, it can use username@localhost to connect to the server.

You would need to make mySQL accept connections from outside localhost by adding another user username@% (% meaning "any host").

Note however that this is not good practice - if you have a static IP, consider limiting access to that one address.

Answer 2

MySQL treats logins as specific to the host they originate from. You can have a different password from your home machine than the one you use on the server itself, and you can have entirely different sets of permissions granted to the same username from different origin hosts.

On PHPMyadmin, the database is running on the same server as the web server, and therefore refers to itself as localhost, with IP 127.0.0.1. Your machine on which Workbench is installed must access MySQL with different credentials than your username@localhost. The server requires you to grant access to your username from any host you intend to connect from.

In PhpMyAdmin, you will need to grant access to your database from the remote host: (See also Pekka's answer for how to allow connections from any host)

GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES on dbname.* TO yourusername@your_remote_hostname IDENTIFIED BY 'yourpassword';

To see all the grants you currently have on localhost so that you can duplicate them for the remote host:

SHOW GRANTS FOR yourusername@localhost;

Additionally, the MySQL server needs to be setup to accept remote connections in the first place. This isn't always the case, especially on web hosting platforms. In the my.cnf file, the skip-networking line has to be removed or commented out. If there is no skip-networking line, you must comment out the line:

bind-address = 127.0.0.1 

...then restart MySQL.