Adminer is a lightweight alternative to phpMyAdmin. Its total package size is 400KB, compared to 4.2MB of phpMyAdmin. Unlike phpMyAdmin, which can only manage MySQL databases, this lightweight database manager can manage MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, MS SQL, Oracle, and SimpleDB databases.

Thanks to its multi-language support, Adminer is used by individuals worldwide. It supports Arabic, Catalan, Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, Estonian, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Lithuanian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Tamil, Turkish, and Ukrainian.

This guide will explain how to setup Adminer on either Debian or Ubuntu.

Setup Adminer

It is required that Apache is already installed on your server. Once Apache is installed, Adminer can be installed from one of two sources.

From Debian/Ubuntu Repositories

This is an older version, 3.3.3-1.

sudo apt-get install adminer

From The Adminer Project Homepage

Newer versions are offered here, such as 4.2.1.

sudo mkdir /usr/share/adminer
sudo wget "http://www.adminer.org/latest.php" -O /usr/share/adminer/latest.php
sudo ln -s /usr/share/adminer/latest.php /usr/share/adminer/adminer.php
echo "Alias /adminer.php /usr/share/adminer/adminer.php" | sudo tee /etc/apache2/conf-available/adminer.conf
sudo a2enconf adminer.conf

Once the installation completes, restart Apache.

sudo service apache2 restart

At this point, the setup is complete. You can access Adminer at either of the following addresses.

http://[SERVER_IP]/adminer  
http://[SERVER_IP]/adminer.php

Replace [SERVER_IP] with the IP address of your VPS.