Import your existing MySQL/MariaDB database schema to AppGini

If you already have one or more existing MySQL (or MariaDB) databases, you can easily work with them in AppGini. The steps are explained below, but here is a quick TLDR-style overview:

  1. Download the latest version of our MySQL2AppGini conversion tool (m2a.zip).
  2. Unzip the downloaded file (m2a.php) and copy/upload to your server.
  3. Use your browser to navigate to the extracted file and follow the steps from there.

Detailed instructions follow below.

Step 1: Download m2a.php

AppGini versions 5.74 and below shipped with a built-in wizard for importing database schema to AppGini. However, this tool doesn't work correctly in cases where your MySQL server is not configured to accept remote connections -- and actually, it's not recommended to enable remote connections for MySQL. So, we're deprecating this tool as of AppGini 5.75 and making a new one available. The new tool works with any version of AppGini not just 5.75+.

Download latest version of MySQL2AppGini

After downloading the zip file above, extract it. The extracted file is named m2a.php.

Step 2: Copy/upload m2a.php to your server

If your database is hosted locally on your PC (for example if you're using Xampp), you should copy the extracted m2a.php file from the above step to a folder inside your document root (C:\xampp\htdocs is the default document root for Xampp). It doesn't matter which folder .. you could just put it on your document root, or inside any subfolder.

If your database is hosted on a remote web server, use FTP, SSH, your cPanel file manager, or any other preferred method to upload m2a.php to your web server. You should upload it to your server document root or any other sub-folder inside it. Consult your hosting server documentation if you're not sure where is your document root folder.

Step 3: Visit the uploaded m2a.php file in your browser

If your database is hosted locally, you should point your browser to http://localhost/m2a.php (if the file is placed directly inside the document root), or http://localhost/subfolder/m2a.php if it's placed in a subfolder. From there, follow the instructions

If your database is hosted on a remote web server, point your browser to the URL of the uploaded script. It could look something like this: https://your-server.com/test/m2a.php (assuming you uploaded it to a subfolder named 'test' under your server's document root). Follow the instructions from there.

Security note: m2a.php would ask you to enter your database credentials. Thus, if your server is not local, it's highly recommended to make sure you are using an encrypted connection if your server supports it. The URL should start with https:// rather than http://.

Troubleshooting errors

When running m2a.php above, you might in some cases see errors mentioning database connection issues, or invalid username/password .. etc. You should contact your server administrator for the correct credentials to use in this case.

Another issue you might encounter is this error message:

Couldn't save the project file. Please chmod the folder where you uploaded this script to 777 and try again.

In this case you should set the permissions of the folder containing m2a.php to be writable by your script.

Limitations

Please note that AppGini doesn't currently support tables that have any of the following:

  1. a multiple-field primary key.
  2. foreign key constraints (you can import them but the foreign keys won't be detected, you have to define lookup fields inside AppGini).
  3. no primary keys (tables in AppGini must have one field set as a primary key).