As a work around, login to your MySQL as root user and run the command below to change the Authentication Plugin for the root user to mysql_native_password as shown below;

ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY '[email protected]';

Restart MySQL and go back to the browser and login to your phpMyAdmin dashboard.

Install Method 2: packaged phpMyAdmin

This was the most painful process. The installation is very easy but you need to tell which version you want to install. I installed:

pkg install phpMyAdmin5-php72-5.0.1

It installs it at /usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin so move it to /usr/local/www/apache24/data/

mv /usr/local/www/phpMyAdmin/ /usr/local/www/apache24/data/

if you gona navigate to it i.e. http://your_jail_ip/phpMyAdmin. It will not work. You now need to edit your httpd.conf config again. 

vi /usr/local/etc/apache24/httpd.conf

Add at the end:

Alias /phpmyadmin/ "/usr/local/www/apache24/data/phpMyAdmin/"
 
    <Directory "/usr/local/www/apache24/data/phpMyAdmin/">
        Options None
        AllowOverride Limit
        Require local
        Require host .example.com    

Restart apache by:  service apache24 restart 

Navigate to it again and you will get a Forbidden error. So reopen the httpd.conf file and add the following in the same directive:

 Alias /phpmyadmin/ “/usr/local/www/apache24/data/phpMyAdmin/”

    <Directory “/usr/local/www/apache24/data/phpMyAdmin/”>

      AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

                # Apache 2.4

                        Require all granted

                # Apache 2.2

                Order Allow,Deny

                Allow from All

        Options None

        AllowOverride Limit

        Require local

        Require host .example.com

Restart apache: service apache24 restart , The phpMyAdmin page will appear. Now if you login, you will get an error:

 mysqli::real_connect(): The server requested authentication method unknown to the client [caching_sha2_password]

To fix this, you will have to login mysql via jail terminal.

mysql -u root -p

And execute the command: 

alter user 'root'@'localhost' identified with mysql_native_password by 'put_complext_password_here';

Re-login and you should be in 🙂

Add the following in your my.cnf file: 

vi /usr/local/etc/mysql/my.cnf 
default_authentication_plugin = mysql_native_password

under the [mysqld] section.

Now you can login into myPhpAdmin.

If you see the following error message at the bottom of the page when you first log in to /phpMyAdmin (using a previously setup MySQL username and password) :

ERROR: The configuration file now needs a secret passphrase (blowfish_secret)  

You need to add a blowfish password to the phpMyAdmin’s config file. Edit /usr/local/www/apache24/data/phpMyAdmin/config.inc.php and insert a random blowfish “password” in the line

$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = ; /* YOU MUST FILL IN THIS FOR COOKIE AUTH! */  

It should now look something like this:

$cfg['blowfish_secret'] = 'randomPassword$£@£{8IZr323xYcSN]0s)r$9b_JUnb{~Xz'; /* YOU MUST FILL IN THIS FOR COOKIE AUTH! */  

This all assumes you’ve already properly created the config file,

cp config.sample.inc.php config.inc.php

Restart mysql-server: service mysql-server restart

Re-login and the error should be gone.