How to Access phpMyAdmin on Your AWS EC2 Bitnami WordPress Instance

Bitnami take security seriously with their applications, there’s no doubt about that. In order to access phpMyAdmin on your AWS instance, it’s not simply a case of navigating to the IP of your instance and adding /phpmyadmin to the end of the URL or going to a control panel and clicking the phpMyAdmin logo.

Luckily, it’s not all that difficult to access it after all. All that we’ll need to do is create an SSH tunnel.

Assuming you’re all setup with SSH access (if not, follow my guide here), let’s get started.

Setup & Open SSH Tunnel

First, we need to open up PuTTY and load our existing SSH configuration for connecting to our AWS instance.

We then need to go to Connection > SSH > Tunnels and enter the following into the two fields towards the bottom of the PuTTY screen:

• Source port: 8888
• Destination: localhost:80

It should look like this:

Click Add to add it to the list of forwarded ports.

Great – the tunnel is now prepared. Don’t forget to go back to the Session panel and save your configuration!

Once you’re ready, go ahead and click Open to establish the SSH connection with the tunnel.

Navigate to phpMyAdmin & Login

Now that we have the tunnel open via our SSH connection, all we need to do is navigate to phpMyAdmin by going to http://127.0.0.1:8888/phpmyadmin/.

Finally, just login with the following details:

• Username: root
• Password: your Bitnami application password (follow this guide to get it)

There you have it – you should now be logged in to phpMyAdmin where you’ll be able to view your databases, tables, user accounts and more!

Let me know if this helps you or if you experience any issues in the comments below.