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.
sudo apt update
sudo apt install mysql-server
sudo mysql_secure_installation
This tutorial will explain how to install MySQL version 5.7 on an Ubuntu 18.04 server.
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:
sudo apt update
Then install the default package:
sudo apt install mysql-server
This will install 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:
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.
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.
Conclusion
You now have a basic MySQL setup installed on your server.
