phpMyAdmin + CentOS + Apache Worker MPM

After installing phpMyAdmin I kept getting the above error which reads:

The mysqli extension is missing. Please check your PHP configuration. <a href="Documentation.html#faqmysql" target="documentation"><img src="themes/dot.gif" title="Documentation" alt="Documentation" /></a>

I had run “yum install php-mysqli” with success, and “php -i | grep mysqli” was showing the mysqli was enabled but looking at phpinfo() through the Apache it didn’t look like mysqli was enabled after all. It then occurred to me that I am using the Apache Worker MPM, which requires the use of php-zts rather than regular php. It looked like php-mysqli doesn’t include the extension for php-zts, which was verified by checking out /usr/lib64/php-zts/modules – no php_mysqli.ini file here.

What to do.

The answer for me was to remove php-mysqli and replace it with php-mysqlnd.

>yum remove php-mysqli
yum install php-mysqlnd
service httpd restart

Reload the page, and the error should be gone. Yay!