phpMyAdmin: Spurious Logout

Some people may have noticed that they are logged out automatically from phpmyadmin after a while of inactivity. This is a security feature. When you leave your desktop but keep your browser open and an intruder suddenly appears at your mouse and keyboard, they can not alter the database.

This is, however, a bit annoying when you're in your own office and working with the database, then doing something else, and coming back to the database only to log in again. This behaviour can be configured, though. It also only seems to be present if you have turned on JavaScript in your client.

The default behaviour is to be logged out after 30 minutes (1800 seconds) of inactivity. This can be altered in the file config.inc.php in /etc/phpmyadmin/.

   // Default: 1800 seconds = 30 minutes
   $cfg['LoginCookieValidity'] = 1800;