Recently I published an article about Windows Vista Home Premium and the “problems” I was running into when installing my programs. Well, this time I run into another problem when I installed appserv-win32-2.6.0 . Everything seemed to work just fine, Apache was working well, but when I tried opening PhpMyAdmin for some reason it was displaying a blank page after I entered my login information.

Method #1

The solution to this blank page problem is fairly easy. Simply modify this line in the phpmyadmin/config.inc.php

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host']          = 'localhost';

to this:

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host']          = '127.0.0.1';

In the above code, you’re changing your name server to 127.0.0.1 in order to use TCP/IP connection. After this, you should be able to see your PhpMyAdmin page by opening in your browser the address http://127.0.0.1/PhpMyAdmin

Hope this helps!

Note: Whenever you specify “localhost” or “localhost:port” as server, the MySQL client library will override this and try to connect to a local socket (named pipe on Windows). If you want to use TCP/IP, use “127.0.0.1” instead of “localhost”. If the MySQL client library tries to connect to the wrong local socket, you should set the correct path as Runtime Configuration in your PHP configuration and leave the server field blank.

UPDATE Dec 15, 2010:

Doing further research on this subject, this problem seems to be caused by a PHP bug #45150. The problem seems to be with Windows resolving localhost, more specifically localhost resolving to ::1 when IPv6 is enabled. If you have Windows Vista or Windows 7 it’s most likely you have IPV6 enabled by default.

Method #2

1. Go to Network Connections-> Properties and on local area connection->uncheck IPV6.

2.Open up \%windir%\system32\drivers\etc\ with a text editor and comment out this line:

::1 localhost

and prefix it:

#::1 localhost

This fix will help the loopback interface 127.0.0.1 point to localhost.

Save it and your PHP/MySQL connections will immediately begin working.

This is another way of fixing this problem. Both methods will work, but I’d recommend to follow this last method over the first one since it’s updated and it solves the localhost issue in a more efficient way now that we have detected the source of the problem.

Big thanks: to my readers Joberror, Adrian, Brandon and everyone else for your contributions.