Using MySQL with Bitnami on Vagrant VM

The Bitnami install doccumented earlier is a bit broken relative to MySQL. Evidently, when Bitnami installs in the VM situation and moves itself to the /opt/rubystack... directory, it expects to be a slightly more traditional install and use the userid mysql for running the MySQL server. However, the built databases are secured to the vagrant user account (at least in my release). This is relatively easy to confirm, try starting the server

 sudo ~/rubystack/ctlscript.sh start mysql

and not that it fails (after a bit). One can look at the mysqld.log in ~/rubystack/mysql/data directory and see access errors.

The fix is to give the mysql user access to the MySQL data directory:

cd ~/rubystack/mysql  
sudo chown -R mysql.vagrant data

After this is done, the startup command should work.

To start MySQL

cd rubystack  
sudo ./ctlscript.sh start mysql

To stop MySQL

cd rubystack  
sudo ./ctlscript.sh stop mysql

Create MySQL databases for dev, test, production

The following sequence setups the development, test, and production databases for the Rails project tbd4students.

tbd4students> mysql -u root
CREATE DATABASE tbd4students_development DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON tbd4students_development.* TO 'vagrant'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
CREATE DATABASE tbd4students_test DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON tbd4students_test.* TO 'vagrant'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
CREATE DATABASE tbd4students_production DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON tbd4students_production.* TO 'vagrant'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';
EXIT;

In this example, the username vagrant (default in the VM) with a password of ‘password’ is used to access the server. There is also a presumption that the root password to the MySQL server is blank. This configuration, of course, is NO security and is only useful when on a closed system. One should research how to configure things more securely for anything that will be Internet (or even LAN) visible.