Fix PHPMyAdmin Error: requested authentication method unknown to the client [caching_sha2_password]

While installing PHPMyAdmin on your Mac OS, you might encounter the following error:

mysqli_real_connect(): The server requested authentication method unknown to the client [caching_sha2_password]
mysqli_real_connect(): (HY000/2054): The server requested authentication method unknown to the client

This error happens because of the change in authentication in the later MySQL versions.

This is how to solve the above error:

1. Make sure your MySQL Server is running

1. From your terminal, login to MySQL:

sudo /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql -u root -p

Enter the password you used to setup MySQL

1. Run the below command from MySQL shell:

ALTER USER 'user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'password';

OR

ALTER USER root IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'password';

Replace user and password with your actual values.

Comments

[Leslie]

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[Hassan Athmani]

Hello Kelvin,
Thank you for the fix, I found out that the user needs to run the command flush privileges; after performing the ALTER operation, or just restarting the MySQL server.