Tutorial

How To Install MySQL on Ubuntu 18.04

Updated on March 18, 2022
Default avatar

By Mark Drake

Manager, Developer Education

English
How To Install MySQL on Ubuntu 18.04
Not using Ubuntu 18.04?Choose a different version or distribution.
Ubuntu 18.04

A previous version of this tutorial was written by Hazel Virdó

Introduction

MySQL is an open-source database management system, commonly installed as part of the popular LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/Perl) stack. It uses a relational database and SQL (Structured Query Language) to manage its data.

The short version of the installation is simple: update your package index, install the mysql-server package, and then run the included security script.

  1. sudo apt update
  2. sudo apt install mysql-server
  3. sudo mysql_secure_installation

This tutorial will explain how to install MySQL version 5.7 on an Ubuntu 18.04 server. However, if you’re looking to update an existing MySQL installation to version 5.7, you can read this MySQL 5.7 update guide instead.

Prerequisites

To follow this tutorial, you will need:

Step 1 — Installing MySQL

On Ubuntu 18.04, only the latest version of MySQL is included in the APT package repository by default. At the time of writing, that’s MySQL 5.7

To install it, update the package index on your server with apt:

  1. sudo apt update

Then install the default package:

  1. sudo apt install mysql-server

Ensure that the server is running using the systemctl start command:

  1. sudo systemctl start mysql.service

These commands will install and start MySQL, but will not prompt you to set a password or make any other configuration changes. Because this leaves your installation of MySQL insecure, we will address this next.

Step 2 — Configuring MySQL

For fresh installations, you’ll want to run the included security script. This changes some of the less secure default options for things like remote root logins and sample users. On older versions of MySQL, you needed to initialize the data directory manually as well, but this is done automatically now.

Run the security script:

  1. sudo mysql_secure_installation

This will take you through a series of prompts where you can make some changes to your MySQL installation’s security options. The first prompt will ask whether you’d like to set up the Validate Password Plugin, which can be used to test the strength of your MySQL password. Regardless of your choice, the next prompt will be to set a password for the MySQL root user. Enter and then confirm a secure password of your choice.

From there, you can press Y and then ENTER to accept the defaults for all the subsequent questions. This will remove some anonymous users and the test database, disable remote root logins, and load these new rules so that MySQL immediately respects the changes you have made.

To initialize the MySQL data directory, you would use mysql_install_db for versions before 5.7.6, and mysqld --initialize for 5.7.6 and later. However, if you installed MySQL from the Debian distribution, as described in Step 1, the data directory was initialized automatically; you don’t have to do anything. If you try running the command anyway, you’ll see the following error:

Output
mysqld: Can't create directory '/var/lib/mysql/' (Errcode: 17 - File exists)
. . .
2018-04-23T13:48:00.572066Z 0 [ERROR] Aborting

Note that even though you’ve set a password for the root MySQL user, this user is not configured to authenticate with a password when connecting to the MySQL shell. If you’d like, you can adjust this setting by following Step 3.

Step 3 — (Optional) Adjusting User Authentication and Privileges

In Ubuntu systems running MySQL 5.7 (and later versions), the root MySQL user is set to authenticate using the auth_socket plugin by default rather than with a password. This allows for some greater security and usability in many cases, but it can also complicate things when you need to allow an external program (e.g., phpMyAdmin) to access the user.

In order to use a password to connect to MySQL as root, you will need to switch its authentication method from auth_socket to mysql_native_password. To do this, open up the MySQL prompt from your terminal:

  1. sudo mysql

Next, check which authentication method each of your MySQL user accounts use with the following command:

  1. SELECT user,authentication_string,plugin,host FROM mysql.user;
Output
+------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-----------+ | user | authentication_string | plugin | host | +------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-----------+ | root | | auth_socket | localhost | | mysql.session | *THISISNOTAVALIDPASSWORDTHATCANBEUSEDHERE | mysql_native_password | localhost | | mysql.sys | *THISISNOTAVALIDPASSWORDTHATCANBEUSEDHERE | mysql_native_password | localhost | | debian-sys-maint | *CC744277A401A7D25BE1CA89AFF17BF607F876FF | mysql_native_password | localhost | +------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-----------+ 4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

In this example, you can see that the root user does in fact authenticate using the auth_socket plugin. To configure the root account to authenticate with a password, run the following ALTER USER command. Be sure to change password to a strong password of your choosing, and note that this command will change the root password you set in Step 2:

  1. ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'password';

Then, run FLUSH PRIVILEGES which tells the server to reload the grant tables and put your new changes into effect:

  1. FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Check the authentication methods employed by each of your users again to confirm that root no longer authenticates using the auth_socket plugin:

  1. SELECT user,authentication_string,plugin,host FROM mysql.user;
Output
+------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-----------+ | user | authentication_string | plugin | host | +------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-----------+ | root | *3636DACC8616D997782ADD0839F92C1571D6D78F | mysql_native_password | localhost | | mysql.session | *THISISNOTAVALIDPASSWORDTHATCANBEUSEDHERE | mysql_native_password | localhost | | mysql.sys | *THISISNOTAVALIDPASSWORDTHATCANBEUSEDHERE | mysql_native_password | localhost | | debian-sys-maint | *CC744277A401A7D25BE1CA89AFF17BF607F876FF | mysql_native_password | localhost | +------------------+-------------------------------------------+-----------------------+-----------+ 4 rows in set (0.00 sec)

You can see in this example output that the root MySQL user now authenticates using a password. Once you confirm this on your own server, you can exit the MySQL shell:

  1. exit

Alternatively, some may find that it better suits their workflow to connect to MySQL with a dedicated user. To create such a user, open up the MySQL shell once again:

  1. sudo mysql

Note: If you have password authentication enabled for root, as described in the preceding paragraphs, you will need to use a different command to access the MySQL shell. The following will run your MySQL client with regular user privileges, and you will only gain administrator privileges within the database by authenticating:

  1. mysql -u root -p

From there, create a new user and give it a strong password:

  1. CREATE USER 'sammy'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Then, grant your new user the appropriate privileges. For example, you could grant the user privileges to all tables within the database, as well as the power to add, change, and remove user privileges, with this command:

  1. GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'sammy'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;

Note that, at this point, you do not need to run the FLUSH PRIVILEGES command again. This command is only needed when you modify the grant tables using statements like INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE. Because you created a new user, instead of modifying an existing one, FLUSH PRIVILEGES is unnecessary here.

Following this, exit the MySQL shell:

  1. exit

Finally, let’s test the MySQL installation.

Step 4 — Testing MySQL

Regardless of how you installed it, MySQL should have started running automatically. To test this, check its status.

  1. systemctl status mysql.service

You’ll see output similar to the following:

Output
● mysql.service - MySQL Community Server
   Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/mysql.service; enabled; vendor preset: en
   Active: active (running) since Wed 2018-04-23 21:21:25 UTC; 30min ago
 Main PID: 3754 (mysqld)
    Tasks: 28
   Memory: 142.3M
      CPU: 1.994s
   CGroup: /system.slice/mysql.service
           └─3754 /usr/sbin/mysqld

If MySQL isn’t running, you can start it with sudo systemctl start mysql.

For an additional check, you can try connecting to the database using the mysqladmin tool, which is a client that lets you run administrative commands. For example, this command says to connect to MySQL as root (-u root), prompt for a password (-p), and return the version.

  1. sudo mysqladmin -p -u root version

You should see output similar to this:

Output
mysqladmin  Ver 8.42 Distrib 5.7.21, for Linux on x86_64
Copyright (c) 2000, 2018, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its
affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective
owners.

Server version		5.7.21-1ubuntu1
Protocol version	10
Connection		Localhost via UNIX socket
UNIX socket		/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Uptime:			30 min 54 sec

Threads: 1  Questions: 12  Slow queries: 0  Opens: 115  Flush tables: 1  Open tables: 34  Queries per second avg: 0.006

This means MySQL is up and running.

Conclusion

You now have a basic MySQL setup installed on your server. Here are a few examples of next steps you can take:

Want to launch a high-availability MySQL cluster in a few clicks? DigitalOcean offers worry-free MySQL managed database hosting. We’ll handle maintenance and updates and even help you migrate your database from external servers, cloud providers, or self-hosted solutions. Leave the complexity to us, so you can focus on building a great application.

Learn more here


About the authors
Default avatar

Manager, Developer Education

Technical Writer @ DigitalOcean

Still looking for an answer?

Ask a questionSearch for more help

Was this helpful?
 
10 Comments


This textbox defaults to using Markdown to format your answer.

You can type !ref in this text area to quickly search our full set of tutorials, documentation & marketplace offerings and insert the link!

completely useful, thanks mark

Thanks for the great tutorial(s)!

I have a question regarding mysql_secure_installation:

I installed mysql-server 5.7 on Ubuntu 18.04 and ran the commands manually, as described here:

UPDATE mysql.user SET authentication_string='secretpassword' WHERE user='root';
DELETE FROM mysql.user WHERE user='';
DELETE FROM mysql.user WHERE user='root' AND Host NOT IN ('localhost', 
'127.0.0.1', '::1');
DROP DATABASE IF EXISTS test;
DELETE FROM mysql.db WHERE Db='test' OR Db='test\\_%';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Apart from changing the root password, each of the commands showed no effect at all:

Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

I have two questions:

  1. Why would I want to use mysql_secure_installation if it does not have any effect?
  2. Why would I want to set a root password if I stick with the default auth_socket authentification?

I followed the instructions on Step 3 and just ended up locking myself of mysql. Something there is not right or should be made more clear as to what is going on.

Thanks very much for great tutorials

thanks. It worked

I followed the tutorial and installed correctly, I launched port 3306 with the command sudo ufw allow 3306 / tcp, but I couldn’t get external access to the bank. What should I do?

i want to install specifically mysql 5.6 on ubuntu. But unable to achieve that. Is there a way. Want to deploy an old application as it is. Plz help. Thanks.

Looks good. Thanks. The only thing that i want to point out is that it is really important to remove all mariadb libraries before install mysql else the install fails.

Thanks, guys!

Hi All, I followed the instructions but get stuck already @ sudo apt install mysql-server, getting the blow output. Any ideas ?Reading package lists… Done Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done Note, selecting ‘percona-xtradb-cluster-server-5.7’ instead of ‘mysql-server’ Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable distribution that some required packages have not yet been created or been moved out of Incoming. The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies: percona-xtradb-cluster-server-5.7 : Depends: libdbd-mysql-perl but it is not going to be installed Depends: libdbi-perl but it is not installable Depends: percona-xtrabackup (>= 2.4.4) but it is not going to be installed Depends: socat but it is not installable E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

Any idea what is wrong ? I am on 18.04 LTS Linux JrnCnfDB 4.15.0-48-generic #51-Ubuntu

Try DigitalOcean for free

Click below to sign up and get $200 of credit to try our products over 60 days!

Sign up

Join the Tech Talk
Success! Thank you! Please check your email for further details.

Please complete your information!

Get our biweekly newsletter

Sign up for Infrastructure as a Newsletter.

Hollie's Hub for Good

Working on improving health and education, reducing inequality, and spurring economic growth? We'd like to help.

Become a contributor

Get paid to write technical tutorials and select a tech-focused charity to receive a matching donation.

Welcome to the developer cloud

DigitalOcean makes it simple to launch in the cloud and scale up as you grow — whether you're running one virtual machine or ten thousand.

Learn more
DigitalOcean Cloud Control Panel