Long a staple of open source computing, MySQL serves as the database back end to a massive array of applications, from network monitoring frameworks to Facebook. To those uninitiated in how databases work, setting up MySQL for the first time can be somewhat daunting. Nevertheless, with a few pointers and concepts, you can quickly get a new MySQL instance up and running, ready to deploy your application.
For the purposes of this guide, we'll assume that the reader has little or no experience with MySQL on Linux, and we'll concentrate on getting MySQL installed and configured to the point where an application can be connected to the database and begin operation. Advanced elements of MySQL, such as database programming and the SQL language itself, are beyond the scope of this effort.
Installing MySQL
First things first, we need to get MySQL installed on our system. Assuming that we have a clean installation of Ubuntu Server, Fedora, or CentOS, we simply need to use the package installation tools to pull down the required packages and install them.
Note that we may need some extra packages aside from the main MySQL code in order to make our application function. For instance, if we're going to use a PHP-based application with MySQL, we'll need to install the PHP MySQL packages that allow PHP to talk to MySQL servers.
To begin, however, we should check to see if MySQL was installed during the OS installation. On Fedora and CentOS we would run this as root:
# rpm -qa | grep mysql
On Ubuntu, we would run:
$ sudo dpkg -l | grep mysql
If the mysql-server package is listed, it's already installed. You should also ensure that the MySQL extensions are installed for your application, such as php-mysql.
If we don't see MySQL in the list, we need to install it. On Fedora and CentOS, we'll use YUM to do this as the root user:
# yum install mysql-server php-mysql
This will install the MySQL server, client, and required packages and libraries, as well as the PHP MySQL extensions.
On Ubuntu, we'd run:
$ sudo apt-get install mysql-server php5-mysql
This will install the MySQL server and the PHP MySQL extensions. In addition, the installer will prompt for the MySQL root user password and start the server before completing the install.
For CentOS and Fedora, we now need to start the server and set the MySQL root user password:
$ su -
# service mysqld start
# mysqladmin password <newpassword>
Where <newpassword> should be replaced with the actual password.
At this point, we should have a functional MySQL server instance. We can test by logging into the server with the mysql client:
$ mysql -u root -p
