Install MySQL on Ubuntu | Gary Woodfine

Iâ€™ll cover how to install MySQL Server on Ubuntu 18.04 Server. MySQL is a popular and widely used relational databases amongst developers, especially Linux based development projects.

Many developers prefer to use Ubuntu servers for their deployment servers, although a statement like that is obviously going to be met with some backlash from the Linux community and like any community people will have a difference of opinion. Personally, Ubuntu is my distribution of choice.

Installing mySql on Ubuntu servers is a relatively simple task, becasue mySql is available in the Ubuntu apt repository, which means it can be installed via the terminal as follows.

Advice

In this post we assume you are not logged in as root, and therefore require to elevate your privelege to the root user. If you are logged in as root, simply omit sudo from the commands

# always remember to update and upgrade you repo list
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade -y

We can now install mysql

sudo apt-get install mysql-server

Depending on the installation process and package version you may be prompted to provide some additional information. I have noticed this has varied over the past few months so it is difficult to document definitively.

Once the installation is complete simply check the status of the service.

sudo systemctl status mysql.service

The mysql services for Ubuntu should be configured to start automatically. If not you can do this as follows.

sudo systemctl start mysql.service
sudo systemctl enable mysql.service

Login into mySql Console

MySQL root user on Ubuntu does not have password and its use auth_socket plugin to authenticate the root user. You can only login to the MySQL root using the system root account or using the sudo command:

sudo mysql

If you would like to set mysql root password, run the ALTER USER command as follows:

ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'new-password';

Access mysql server external

One of the more common problems that users run into when trying to set up a remote MySQL database is that their MySQL instance is only configured to listen for local connections. This is MySQLâ€™s default setting, but it wonâ€™t work for a remote database setup since MySQL must be able to listen for anÂ externalÂ IP address where the server can be reached.Â

In my case I have mysql installed on my Local network using my Proxmox virtual server environment. So I need to enable access to mysql from other machines on the network. By default mysql server binds itself to localhost (127.0.0.1) so you will not be able to access it externally.

We will need to edit the configuration to edit bind address value

sudo nano /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf 

#
# Instead of skip-networking the default is now to listen only on
# localhost which is more compatible and is not less secure.
bind-address            = 192.168.0.12

Summary

The above presented easy to follow guide to installing mySQL on Ubuntu. We did not cover the more complex security and administration process which you should bear in mind once you have installed the server.

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Gary Woodfine

Technical Director at threenine.co.uk

Gary is Technical Director at threenine.co.uk, an independent software vendor specialising in IoT, Field Service and associated managed services,enabling customers to be efficient, productive, secure and scale-able.