I’m trying to figure out how to automatically sync a database from phpMyAdmin to my local MySQL setup. The database I need to copy is maintained by my service provider and I can’t access their SQL server directly.
What I want to do is create a complete copy on my local MySQL first, then set up some kind of scheduled sync to keep getting updates. I need this because I’m building a Power BI dashboard that requires this data.
My current setup:
MySQL 5.7.42 running on Ubuntu 18.04
Apache 2.4.29 web server
PHP 7.2.34 with mysqli and curl extensions
Connection through localhost socket
Character set is latin1
I’ve been looking at different approaches but not sure what’s the best way to automate this process. Has anyone dealt with something similar before? Any tools or scripts that might help?
I built something similar for a client last year. Skip phpMyAdmin exports - I wrote a PHP script that connects to the remote database through their web interface and pulls data via API calls or screen scraping (whatever was available). You’ll need solid error handling and logging since network hiccups will kill your sync. I used cron jobs every few hours plus a lock file to prevent overlapping syncs. Watch out for phpMyAdmin session timeouts - you’ll probably need to handle auth programmatically. If your dataset’s big, do incremental syncing with timestamps or primary keys. Full dumps get messy fast. Been running for months now with barely any maintenance.
yep, good approach! u can use a bash script with wget for syncing, it’s pretty chill. just ensure ur cron job is configured right. also, keep an eye on the data size - might take time if it’s big. good luck!
phpMyAdmin automation is a pain, but you can make it work. Use Selenium WebDriver instead of curl - it handles the complex auth flows way better. Set up your script to log in, hit the export page, grab the SQL file, then import it locally. It’s hacky but rock solid once you get it configured.
I ran into this exact situation with a hosting provider that only gave me phpMyAdmin access. Instead of messing with PHP, I used Puppeteer and Node.js to automate a headless browser. This works way better because Puppeteer handles all the JavaScript and AJAX stuff that phpMyAdmin uses - curl and basic scraping miss that completely. My script logs into phpMyAdmin, goes to the export section, sets up the export parameters, and grabs the SQL file. Then another process imports it into my local MySQL. I run it nightly at 2 AM when traffic’s low. Pro tip: always verify checksums between your downloaded file and previous backup to catch any corruption. And set up email alerts for failed syncs - you won’t know right away if something breaks.
Hit this same problem six months ago with a host that only gave phpMyAdmin access. I solved it with a two-step approach: mysqldump exports plus a custom PHP parser. First, I automated exports through phpMyAdmin’s export API (when available) or faked the export request with curl. Then built a Python script that grabs the SQL dump, validates it, and imports to my local MySQL. The tricky bit was phpMyAdmin session management - you’ve got to capture session cookies and pass them along with each request. For scheduling, I went with systemd timer over cron since it handles failures better. Always validate your downloaded dump before importing - corrupted downloads will wreck your local database. Also set up a staging database first to test everything before you touch your production local copy.