As a work around, login to your MySQL as a root user by running the following command:

mysql -u root -p

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]';

go back to the browser and you should be able to login to your phpMyAdmin dashboard.

To change the default login plugin, you need to edit your my.cnf file and add the following under the [mysqld] section:

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

You can also set the bind address to 0.0.0.0 here in order to login remotely by using SQLWorkBench from your laptop etc.

Restart MySQL by:

service mysql-server restart

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.