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Install MySQL 8 on Ubuntu 20.04

 


Step 1 — Installing MySQL

On Ubuntu 20.04, you can install MySQL using the APT package repository. At the time of this writing, the version of MySQL available in the default Ubuntu repository is version 8.0.19.

To install it, update the package index on your server if you’ve not done so recently:

  • sudo apt update
 

Then install the mysql-server 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 of MySQL, you’ll want to run the DBMS’s included security script. This script changes some of the less secure default options for things like remote root logins and sample users.

Run the security script with sudo:

  • 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 password strength of new MySQL users before deeming them valid. 

Step 3 — Creating a Dedicated MySQL User and Granting Privileges

Upon installation, MySQL creates a root user account which you can use to manage your database. This user has full privileges over the MySQL server, meaning it has complete control over every database, table, user, and so on. Because of this, it’s best to avoid using this account outside of administrative functions. This step outlines how to use the root MySQL user to create a new user account and grant it 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 plugin requires that the name of the operating system user that invokes the MySQL client matches the name of the MySQL user specified in the command, so you must invoke mysql with sudo privileges to gain access to the root MySQL user:

  • sudo mysql
 

Note: If you installed MySQL with another tutorial and enabled password authentication for root, 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:

  • mysql -u root -p
 

Once you have access to the MySQL prompt, you can create a new user with a CREATE USER statement. These follow this general syntax:

CREATE USER 'username'@'host' IDENTIFIED WITH authentication_plugin BY 'password';

 

After CREATE USER, you specify a username. This is immediately followed by an @ sign and then the hostname from which this user will connect. If you only plan to access this user locally from your Ubuntu server, you can specify localhost. Wrapping both the username and host in single quotes isn’t always necessary, but doing so can help to prevent errors.

You have several options when it comes to choosing your user’s authentication plugin. The auth_socket plugin mentioned previously can be convenient, as it provides strong security without requiring valid users to enter a password to access the database. But it also prevents remote connections, which can complicate things when external programs need to interact with MySQL.

As an alternative, you can leave out the WITH authentication plugin portion of the syntax entirely to have the user authenticate with MySQL’s default plugin, caching_sha2_password. The MySQL documentation recommends this plugin for users who want to log in with a password due to its strong security features.

Run the following command to create a user that authenticates with caching_sha2_password. Be sure to change sammy to your preferred username and password to a strong password of your choosing:

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

 

Note: There is a known issue with some versions of PHP that causes problems with caching_sha2_password. If you plan to use this database with a PHP application — phpMyAdmin, for example — you may want to create a user that will authenticate with the older, though still secure, mysql_native_password plugin instead:

CREATE USER 'sammy'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'password';

 

If you aren’t sure, you can always create a user that authenticates with caching_sha2_plugin and then ALTER it later on with this command:

ALTER USER 'sammy'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'password';

 

After creating your new user, you can grant them the appropriate privileges. The general syntax for granting user privileges is as follows:

GRANT PRIVILEGE ON database.table TO 'username'@'host';

 

The PRIVILEGE value in this example syntax defines what actions the user is allowed to perform on the specified database and table. You can grant multiple privileges to the same user in one command by separating each with a comma. You can also grant a user privileges globally by entering asterisks (*) in place of the database and table names. In SQL, asterisks are special characters used to represent “all” databases or tables.

To illustrate, the following command grants a user global privileges to CREATE, ALTER, and DROP databases, tables, and users, as well as the power to INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE data from any table on the server. It also grants the user the ability to query data with SELECT, create foreign keys with the REFERENCES keyword, and perform FLUSH operations with the RELOAD privilege. However, you should only grant users the permissions they need, so feel free to adjust your own user’s privileges as necessary.

You can find the full list of available privileges in the official MySQL documentation.

Run this GRANT statement, replacing sammy with your own MySQL user’s name, to grant these privileges to your user:

GRANT CREATE, ALTER, DROP, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, SELECT, REFERENCES, RELOAD on *.* TO 'sammy'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;

 

Note that this statement also includes WITH GRANT OPTION. This will allow your MySQL user to grant any that it has to other users on the system.

Warning: Some users may want to grant their MySQL user the ALL PRIVILEGES privilege, which will provide them with broad superuser privileges akin to the root user’s privileges, like so:

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

 

Such broad privileges should not be granted lightly, as anyone with access to this MySQL user will have complete control over every database on the server.

Following this, it’s good practice to run the FLUSH PRIVILEGES command. This will free up any memory that the server cached as a result of the preceding CREATE USER and GRANT statements:

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

 

Then you can exit the MySQL client:

mysql> exit

 

In the future, to log in as your new MySQL user, you’d use a command like the following:

mysql -u sammy -p

 

The -p flag will cause the MySQL client to prompt you for your MySQL user’s password in order to authenticate.

Finally, let’s test the MySQL installation.

Step 4 — Testing MySQL

Regardless of

You’ll see output similar to the following:

Output
● mysql.service - MySQL Community Server
     Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/mysql.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since Tue 2020-04-21 12:56:48 UTC; 6min ago
   Main PID: 10382 (mysqld)
     Status: "Server is operational"
      Tasks: 39 (limit: 1137)
     Memory: 370.0M
     CGroup: /system.slice/mysql.service
             └─10382 /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 as a MySQL user named sammy (-u sammy), prompt for a password (-p), and return the version. Be sure to change sammy to the name of your dedicated MySQL user, and enter that user’s password when prompted:

sudo mysqladmin -p -u sammy version
  •  

You should see output similar to this:

Output
mysqladmin  Ver 8.0.19-0ubuntu5 for Linux on x86_64 ((Ubuntu))
Copyright (c) 2000, 2020, 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      8.0.19-0ubuntu5
Protocol version    10
Connection      Localhost via UNIX socket
UNIX socket     /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock
Uptime:         10 min 44 sec

Threads: 2  Questions: 25  Slow queries: 0  Opens: 149  Flush tables: 3  Open tables: 69  Queries per second avg: 0.038

This means MySQL is up and running.

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