Finding the database name for your Zen Cart website

Zen Cart’s administrative area gives you the ability to handle most features and changes you will need to make on a regular basis. However, you may, at some point, need to work with the database directly, normally while using a tool like phpMyAdmin. This may be due to a particular database change that needs to be made that cannot be done via the admin panel, or perhaps you need to troubleshoot an issue. Regardless, knowing the right database name is important and guessing can be dangerous if you have more than a couple of databases in your account. Below are the steps to find the exact database name for your Zen Cart application.

How to locate the database name for your Zen Cart.

1. Log into your cPanel dashboard.
2. Now that you are in the main cPanel area, enter the File Manager.
3. From the File Manager, find and enter the root folder for your Zen Cart store. In our example, the folder is named zcstore and is under the public_html root folder (public_html/zcstore). If you are using an addon domain, look for the domain name under the public_html folder. The files for an addon domain named example.com would be under the public_html/example.com folder
4. Under the root folder for your Zen Cart store, locate and click on the includes folder. Using our main domain as an example, the file path would be public_html/includes.
5. Once in in the includes folder, you will need to open the configure.php file for viewing. To open the file, highlight it and click on the Edit icon located in the toolbar across the top.
6. From the editor, you will see the text for the file. There is quite a bit so you may want to use the search feature or scroll down to find the line with the DB_DATABASE variable. Using the line of code below as an example, the second parameter is the full database name. The name is prefixed by your cPanel username (userna5) and the database name is the last portion (_zen123).

   define('DB_DATABASE', 'userna5_zen123');

7. Write the database name down for later reference. You can now quickly locate your database when using tools like phpMyAdmin regardless of how many databases your hosting account is using.