SQL Buddy is an open source web-based tool was written in PHP language that intended to manage SQLite and MySQL administration via web browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE+ (Internet Explorer).

SQL Buddy is a simple, lightweight and super fast application that offers a well-designed interface with a comprehensive feature set for database administrators and programmers. The tool allows you to add, edit, modify and drop databases and tables, import and export databases, indexes, foreign key relationships, run SQL queries and so on.

It is a good alternative to phpMyAdmin with fast and attractive Ajax-based web interface with support for 47 different languages and themes. Compared to phpMyAdmin, SQL Buddy has almost all features set of phpMyAdmin but SQL Buddy is very lightweight in size 320kb (i.e 1.1MB) after extracting and very easy to setup no installation requires, just unzip the files under web-server root directory and log in with your database username and password.

SQL Buddy also offers some useful keyboard shortcuts like create, edit, delete, refresh, select all and query, so you can manage the tool without the use of mouse. If you deal with large number of MySQL databases, then SQL Buddy is your all time choice.

Installing SQL Buddy in Linux

To use SQL Buddy, first Download SQL Buddy using wget command and unzip the files in a folder and then upload the folder to your web-server root directory via ftp. For example, (/var/www/html/sqlbuddy) in my case, but it shouldn’t matter where you place them or what you name the folder.

# wget https://github.com/calvinlough/sqlbuddy/raw/gh-pages/sqlbuddy.zip
# unzip sqlbuddy.zip
# mv sqlbuddy /var/www/html/

Next, navigate to the web browser and type the following command to launch the SQL Buddy.

http://yourserver.com/sqlbuddy
OR
http://youripaddress/sqlbuddy

Select MySQL and enter your username and password.

Welcome screen of SQL Buddy.

These are some useful SQL Buddy keyboard shortcuts are available.

If you want to customize your installation, then there are few useful variables in config.php that you may interested.

# vi /var/www/html/sqlbuddy/config.php

If you want to restrict SQL Buddy to specific IP address, then open the file with VI editor.

# vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/sqlbuddy.conf

Add the following lines of code to sqlbuddy.conf file. Replace your-ip-address with your server.

Alias /cacti /var/www/html/sqlbuddy

<Directory /var/www/html/sqlbuddy>
 <IfModule mod_authz_core.c>
 # httpd 2.4
 Require all granted
 </IfModule>
 <IfModule !mod_authz_core.c>
 # httpd 2.2
 Order deny,allow
 Deny from all
 Allow from your-ip-address
 </IfModule>
</Directory>

Restart the web server.

# service httpd restart		
OR
# systemctl restart apache2	

If you need any help, please visit the forum available at sql-buddy topics or use our comment section for any queries.