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.

Solution

Make sure your MySQL Server is running:

From your terminal, login to MySQL:

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

Enter the password you used to setup MySQL.

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.