Intstalling MySQL 5.5 on OS X (Mountain) Lion

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I have a dark and painful history of installing MySQL the wrong way, which has forced many late nights and ungodly amounts of frustration. It should be super easy, and sometimes it is, but sometimes it is not. And it can suck.

This post is as much a documentation of what I did so I can re-read it the next time I screw up something as it is a tutorial for you. Let’s begin.

Don’t use MacPorts, use the .dmg from the MySQL website

MacPorts will give you MySQL 5.1.48 or something like it when you install the mysql5 port. The mysql55 port doesn’t upgrade your mysql5 port, it runs side by side and can be super confusing if you want to run terminal commands or change permissions on directories your forgot about when you installed mysql5. mysql5-devel doesn’t build on Mountain Lion yet. Awesome.

The .dmg file will give you everything you need: installs beautifully in /usr/local/mysql, provides a startup item installer that will fire up the mysqld_safe launch daemon when you turn your computer on, and a Preferences pane item that will allow you to start and restart MySQL until you are blue in the face with the simple press of a button.

Your install should start like this:

  • Download the .dmg
  • port uninstall mysql5 and mysql5-devel or whatever else you have installed
  • Add this to your ~/.bash_profile: export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/mysql/bin
  • Restart your computer to make sure only your new MySQL 5.5’s daemon is running (when you uninstall the MacPorts, their daemons are still running until you kill them or restart) by typing:
    ps aux | grep mysql

If you see anything running from /opt, your MacPort(s) aren’t uninstalled.

After you have restarted your computer:

  • Fire up Terminal and type: mysql -u root
  • Run this query:  GRANT ALL ON *.* TO 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'mypassword' WITH GRANT OPTION; (replacing ‘mypassword’ with whatever you want your root password to be)

At this point, you should have a database that works. If not, read about symlink-ing .sock files, etc here: How to install MySQL 5.5 on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion

4 thoughts on “Intstalling MySQL 5.5 on OS X (Mountain) Lion”

  1. A bit late to the party, but for future readers coming from google you can possibly use:
    sudo port install mysql55-server
    sudo port select –set mysql mysql55

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