Tools: How To Install MySQL on Ubuntu 18.04

Manager, Developer Education A previous version of this tutorial was written by Hazel Virdó 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. 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. Note: This tutorial was written for Ubuntu 18.04, which is now end of life and no longer receives security updates. Because of this, some commands and package versions may be outdated or may not work as expected on newer systems. For the most reliable and up-to-date instructions, refer to Step-by-Step MySQL Installation on Ubuntu. To follow this tutorial, you will need: 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: Then install the default package: Ensure that the server is running using the systemctl start command: 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. 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: 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: 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. 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: Next, check which authentication method each of your MySQL user accounts use with the following command: 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: Then, run FLUSH PRIVILEGES which tells the server to reload the grant tables and put your new changes into effect: Check the authentication methods employed by each of your users again to confirm that root no longer authenticates using the auth_socket plugin: 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: 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: 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: From there, create a new user and give it a strong 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: 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: Finally, let’s test the MySQL installation. Regardless of how you installed it, MySQL should have started running automatically. To test this, check its status. You’ll see output similar to the following: 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. You should see output similar to this: This means MySQL is up and running. You now have a basic MySQL setup installed on your server. Here are a few examples of next steps you can take: Thanks for learning with the DigitalOcean Community. Check out our offerings for compute, storage, networking, and managed databases. Learn more about our products Former Technical Writer at DigitalOcean. Focused on SysAdmin topics including Debian 11, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Databases, SQL and PostgreSQL. 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! 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. I confirm that instructions on Step 3 results in locking up ourselves out of mysql.
Indeed, something there is not right. Hello. On the 3rd step when I try execute command: 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: Apart from changing the root password, each of the commands showed no effect at all: I have two questions: I was unable to login to mysql after installation no matter what I did until I found this, but I lost the link to the original page, just copying from my notes. I’m running ubuntu server 18.04 on ESXi. I installed mysql using sudo apt-get install mysql-server. These steps make your password root. Just substitute your desired password for ‘root’ after the word BY at the end of the line that starts with ALTER USER. sudo nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf
Add to bottom of file:
[mysqld]
skip-grant-tables sudo service mysql restart
mysql -u root -p
(press enter to leave blank password) mysql> flush privileges; ALTER USER ‘root’@‘localhost’ IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY ‘root’;
exit
sudo service mysql restart
sudo nano /etc/mysql/my.cnf and change from skip-grant-tables to
#skip-grant-tables
save and exit
sudo service mysql restart Now you will be able to login with the new password
mysql -u root -p
mysql>flush privileges; Hi there, apache2 is being disabled after installation of MySQL on ubuntu 14.4 , any thing am doing wrong? This was a great guide. Thank you. I have one question though and I’ve googled trying to find the answer but so far have found nothing. Is there an alternative means of accomplishing the following 2 from a command line using say
mysqladmin? ALTER USER ‘root’@‘localhost’ IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY ‘password’; I have an application that requires the above as part of the applications installation but I am trying to just put the application’s entire install into a Bash script with “minimal” user interaction. Using your Step 3 works - but requires the manual entry/execution of: $ mysql
msyql> ALTER USER ‘root’@‘localhost’ IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY ‘password’;
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> quit I thought perhaps in a script I could just do: mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD mysqladmin flush-privileges but the access to the application fails where it succeeds if I do it your way using the manual entry/execution of commands. My assumption is that mysqladmin -u root password NEWPASSWORD
changes the password but does not change auth-socket to mysql_native-password like your method. So are you aware of who to make the equivalent of your method? can mysqladmin do that? thanks in advance for any info
Brian On Ubuntu 18.10 on Digital Ocean this guide don’t work… I really don’t know why I . just change the droplet and everything works as expected. This comment has been deleted Got it working without any problems, thank you.
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