Navigating to “localhost/phpMyAdmin” gives me an indexed list of files & folders

[ARNK]

Where of course I'm expecting to see the phpMyAdmin login page. I get a fatal error message when I try localhost/phpMyAdmin/index.php. I should note that I'm not using a package like XAMPP. I wanted the experience to install them without a package. I'm on a Windows 10 64-bit machine, I've installed Apache2.4 and MySQL 5.7.16.0, and I thought PHP 7.0.13.

Apache & MySQL services are started.

Yet I can go to localhost/index.php and output "Hello World" and phpinfo.php appears as expected, showing PHP is enabled.

The errors in phpMyAdmin/index.php look like:

• Fatal error: Uncaught Error: Call to undefined function mb_detect_encoding() in phpMyAdmin\libraries\php-gettext\gettext.inc:177

• PMA_warnMissingExtension('mbstring', true) in phpMyAdmin\libraries\common.inc.php(102)

I'd appreciate any insight as to what I'm missing.

[requinix]

1. You need a DirectoryIndex directive somewhere that instructs Apache to use index.php as the default "index" file when accessing a directory. I would have expected XAMPP to do that for you, but maybe you have to do it yourself in the virtualhost configuration.

2. You don't have the mbstring extension installed. Check the phpMyAdmin installation instructions to see if there's anything else you missed.