How to install a MySQL Server on a Raspberry Pi

This blog post explains the steps you need to perform to install a MySQL server on a Raspberry Pi.

Ensuring the Raspberry Pi is up to date

Before installing any programs it is recommended to make sure your Raspberry Pi is up to date. This reduces the change of a conflict occurring when installing new packages.

You can do this easily enough by running the following two commands.

 sudo apt update
 sudo apt upgrade

Once this has been done you should now be able to install a MySQL server

Installing a MySQL Server

For the Raspberry Pi the default MySQL server in the repositories is MariaDB.

This can be installed by the following command.

sudo apt install mariadb-server

Once installed your server will be ready to use, but it is recommened to perform run the secure installation command.

Securing your MySQL installation

Various MySQL distributions provide a script which allows you to improve the basic security of your MySQL server after installing it.

This can be run with the following command:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

During running the command it will offer you the ability to do the following, it is recommended to perform every step offered:

• Change the default root password (from no password)
• Remove anonymous users
• Disallow remote root login
• Remove the test database
• Reload the privilege tables

Once this has been done you are ready to start using your database.