phpMyAdmin – Error

Error: “Cannot load mysql extension. Please check your PHP configuration

While loading phpMyAdmin on a new server, many customers are having trouble with the above error both in Linux and Windows servers.

One of the main reasons for this error is missing MySQL extension on the server.

At Bobcares, we often get requests to fix PHPMyAdmin error cannot load mysql extension as part of our Server Management Services.

Today, let’s get into the details and see how our Support Engineers fix this PHPMyAdmin error.

How we fixed phpMyAdmin error cannot load MySQL extension

At Bobcares, we have more than a decade of expertise in managing servers, we see many customers face problems while managing phpMyAdmin​.

Now, let’s see the major reasons for this phpMyAdmin errors and how our Support Engineers fix the top errors.

Usually, when a user trying to access phpMyAdmin, the following message will appear on the interface.

Here, let’s see how our Support Engineers fixed this error in both Linux and Windows servers.

Fix for phpMyAdmin error cannot load MySQL extension – Windows

Recently, one of our customers ran into the following error when trying to launch phpMyAdmin from the WAMP icon tray menu.

phpMyAdmin – Error
Cannot load mysql extension. Please check your PHP configuration.

On checking, our Support Engineers found that PHP cannot find the library, mysql.dll. In Windows, it is required to connect to MySQL.

So, we enabled the MySQL extension that loads the mysql.dll library. Also, we set the Windows ‘Path’ to point to the directory where the mysql.dll is sitting.

Finally, we restarted the Windows server.

This is how we fixed the error.

Lacking php-mysql module – Linux

Also, php-mysql is a PHP application module and this module uses MySQL databases. In Linux servers,  in the absence of php-mysql module, customers may get the following error while access PhpMyAdmin.

Error: “Cannot load mysql extension. Please check your PHP configuration”.

So, we installed php-mysql on the server. For that, we took the following steps to solve the error.

yum -y install php-mysql

Finally, we restart the Http service.

service httpd restart

That’s fixed the error.

[Need assistance to fix PHPMyAdmin error cannot load mysql extension? We’ll help you.]

Conclusion

In short, PHPMyAdmin error cannot load mysql extension message can occur both in Linux as well as in windows. Often, this error message happens when the absence of the MySQL extension on the server. Today, we saw how our Support Engineers installed MySQL extension and fix related errors.