[FIXED] phpmyadmin logs out on first click

Issue

I can log into phpmyadmin successfully.

However, whenever I click anywhere within phpmyadmin, or when I reload the page, I end up on the login page again, and am thus unable to use any of the functionality.

How can I fix this problem?

Solution

TL;DR: Remove your cookies, also the ones that belong to subdirectories of the phpmyadmin installation.

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I traced down the issue to a cookie called pmaCookieVer. This cookie contains a number that is related to the phpmyadmin version. If phpmyadmin finds an incompatible value in this version, it ignores all cookies sent by the browser.

The phpmyadmin version that I’m running requires pmaCookieVer to be 4. When looking at the cookies in Chrome Dev Tools, the cookie had the correct value, and even removing all cookies didn’t help.

It turned out that I had a cookie pmaCookieVer with the value 5 on my computer, but it was set to the path /phpmyadmin/js instead of /phpmyadmin. It was thus not displayed in the Chrome Dev Utils on the page /phpmyadmin. There are some PHP scripts in /phpmyadmin/js, and those found the incorrect value and were thus starting a new session and creating a new pmaCookieVer cookie, but this one was for the path /phpmyadmin, so it never overrode the erroneous cookie.

I don’t know how this cookie got there, I assume it was created by some erroneous configuration or a phpmyadmin bug that was present for a while.

Answered By - cdauth