Introduction
In this brief article we'll see how to quickly update phpMyAdmin on a running Wamp server, on a Windows machine. Those six steps will be useful in case you need to upgrade the single package, leaving intact anything else.
Step 1: Check you current version
If you have a Wamp instance running on your machine, you probably have an alias for phpMyAdmin that allows you to access the front-end of the popular MySQL manager. Navigating on
http://localhost/phpmyadmin should produce an output like this, in other words the main panel of phpMyAdmin.
In the following image, please note at the bottom-right corner that my version is out-of-date and needs to be upgraded.
Under the Wamp folder is several subfolders, one of which is "apps". It contains the applications shipped with every Wamp release and we could see a phpMyAdmin subfolder amongst them. In my case, it's the 4.1.14 version, as the panel told me. Time to upgrade.
Step 2: Download the updated package
Step 3: Unzip package in apps directory
When the download is completed, you must unzip the package to the Wamp apps directory. Once finished extracting, you will see there's a new folder inside the subdirectory and it will contain the newly dowloaded scripts. If we try to access http://localhost/phpmyadmin, the old version is still executed. We need to update the proper configuration file.
Step 4: Locate and update phpmyadmin.conf
Under the alias subdirectory (located in the Wamp folder), you'll find a file named phpmyadmin.conf. It's the file that tells Apache, amongst other things, to refer to a specific directory when a user calls for the alias phpmyadmin.
Open the file with a text editor and locate the two paths referencing the older version of phpMyAdmin, substituting those paths with the newly created ones, as the following image shows:
Step 5: Restart the services
Having modified the alias file, you can save it and exit from the text editor. Now you must restart Wamp's services, to be sure our modifies will be considered. Left-click the Wamp icon on the task bar and click on "Restart all services".
Step 6: Check everything went OK
Now re-run your browser at the address http://localhost/phpmyadmin. If everything went OK, you will see your phpMyAdmin installation is now up to date (bottom-right on the following image).