up one level
---

2019-05-28

How to Make an Online Address Book with Installing phpLiteAdmin on Web Hosting


By author Morgan Jassen


For the first ever post on wieldgadget.com we will be doing a deep-dive style tutorial on how to make an online address book with installing phpLiteAdmin on web hosting. It'll make for a longer post, but it will be an example of how detailed some posts/tutorials here may get!

Why would I want to do this?

An answer could be that I want to have an online address book that I host myself, that since it's online, I can access it from anywhere on the internet, so that I can keep track of my contacts / address book on the go, at home, or in the office.

1.)
First, download phpLiteAdmin by browsing to https://www.phpliteadmin.org >> Download >> "Download phpLiteAdmin 1.9.7.1"
Screenshot:




2.)
Next, unzip/decompress the downloaded zip file onto your local computer desktop, which will produce a folder with 3 files -- the main one is "phpliteadmin.php" 
Screenshot:




3.)
Next, as the "phpliteadmin.php" file is actually a plaintext file, it is recommended to edit the text file in a plaintext editor, and set a strong password¹ (as the default password² is not very strong).
Screenshot:




4.)
Next, open the file manager for your organization's web hosting, and upload the "phpliteadmin.php" file.
Screenshot:




5.)
Next, we see here that we've uploaded it to "/home/morganja/public_html/phpliteadmin/phpliteadmin.php", which is where we want it in this case.
Screenshot:




6.)
Next, we log in to phpLiteAdmin. In this case we log at http://morganja.wwwss52.a2hosted.com/phpliteadmin/phpliteadmin.php which corresponds to where we uploaded the script. To log-in / access the database area, we type in the strong password that we had set/specified just a minute ago.
Screenshot:




7.)
Next, we create the database.
Screenshot:




8.)
Next, we create a table in the database with two columns (a.k.a. fields) in the table.
Screenshot:




9.)
Next, we name the two fields and specify TEXT as the type for both of them. We're making an addressbook to store names + email addresses so we'll name the fields accordingly.
Screenshot:




10.)
Next, with the schema having been created, now we can insert some data!
Screenshot:




11.)
Next, we insert a second row of data!
Screenshot:




12.)
Next, let's now view the data by clicking "browse".
Screenshot:




Let's pause here and say we're done at this point. We have our online address book -- it can be used from any web browser -- hooray!

But we'll now describe in a few extra steps, two different ways how to download and export the database or data. One reason we may want to host our own address book, is that we like to "own our own data" and be able to quickly download it and store it as a backup or as a file. 


13.)
Next, what if we want to quickly download the entire database as a single file? Click the [↓] down arrow icon to download the entire database. The format of the database file that phpLiteAdmin uses is "sqlite" database. Pro tip: There are other programs that can open a "sqlite" database file (not just phpLiteAdmin that is), as it is a popular file-based-database format!
Screenshot:




14.)
Next, let's rename the downloaded .sqlite database file. I like to rename the downloaded file with ".sqlite" file extension to make it easy to remember its format.
Screenshot:




15.)
Next, how about exporting the table data that we made in "csv" format, so it is easily openable / readable by a spreadsheet program? (Like Excel or Calc.) To export the table data, click on the database name, then on "Export", then highlight the table name in the list of tables, then choose the "CSV" radio button, then at the bottom click the "Export" button.
Screenshot:




16.)
Finally, after downloading the ".csv" file, we can view it in our preferred spreadsheet app. There's our contact list names of email addresses!
Screenshot:




In conclusion this has been a tutorial on how to make an online address book with installing phpLiteAdmin on web hosting! Thanks for reading!



¹ Note: This guide only covers very minimum security. For one example, the database example in this blog post is downloadable to anyone who knows its URL/address. Perhaps we'll cover security aspects in a future blog post.
² The default password of this version of phpLiteAdmin is "admin".

This blog post first published at https://wieldgadget.com/2019/2019-05-28-online-address-book-phpliteadmin

[2018-07-17 Note: This blog post was republished on 2018-07-17 at https://i̶n̶v̶e̶s̶t̶o̶r̶w̶o̶r̶k̶e̶r̶.̶c̶o̶m̶/2019/2019-05-28-online-addressbook-phpliteadmin.html ]