PHPMyAdmin blank whitescreen (414 Request-URI Too Long)

Ran across an interesting issue where PhpMyAdmin on a newly installed CentOS server was not rendering in a browser. Or more accurately, it was rendering but the CSS kicked in and caused the browser to display a blank page rather than the desired login screen. (Doing a View Source on the page showed that the login form was in fact there, but hidden by CSS.)

After checking the obvious things: PHP running (with error reporting on), file permissions, Apache working, VirtualHost definition correct, I was stuck. There were no indications of a problem, and PHP reported nothing. (Because, as we will see, there were no errors to be displayed…or was there?)

Finally, I turned on Firebug and refreshed the page. Voilà! There were actually two issues, but they were hidden within additional calls in the backend:

Wow, those two long URL strings! One URL was:

A quick search uncovered a possible fix. The default Apache limit of the request line needed to be made longer to accomodate PhpMyAdmin. Doing this was simple. I added the directive to ‘/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf’ like so:

LimitRequestLine 800

I tried a few different lengths and found that 700 was too short, but 800 worked fine. Also, though I simply added this to the conf file, according to the docs you can add this within the VirtualHost rather than making it blanket covering the entire server.

Hope this helps others.