It may seem easy for some, but for others, installing MySQL on Ubuntu or Debian Linux is not an easy task. This article explains to you how to install the MySQL Server and Client packages on a Ubuntu/Debian system.

First of all, make sure your package management tools are up-to-date. Also make sure you install all the latest software available.

1sudo apt-get update
2sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

After a few moments (or minutes, depending on the state of your system), you’re ready to install MySQL.

By default, recent Ubuntu/Debian systems install a MySQL Server from the 5-branch. This is a good thing, so don’t worry.

First, install the MySQL server and client packages:

1sudo apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client

When done, you have a MySQL database read to rock ’n roll. However, there’s more to do.

You need to set a root password, for starters. MySQL has it’s own user accounts, which are not related to the user accounts on your Linux machine. By default, the root account of the MySQL Server is empty. You need to set it. Please replace ‘mypassword’ with your actual password and myhostname with your actual hostname.

1sudo mysqladmin -u root -h localhost password 'mypassword'
2sudo mysqladmin -u root -h myhostname password 'mypassword'

Now, you probably don’t want just the MySQL Server. Most likely you have Apache+PHP already installed, and want MySQL to go with that. Here are some libraries you need to install to make MySQL available to PHP:

1sudo apt-get install php5-mysql

Or for Ruby:

1sudo apt-get install libmysql-ruby

You can now access your MySQL server like this:

1mysql -u root -p

Have fun using MySQL Server.