How to Install MariaDB on Debian 10

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MariaDB on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, MariaDB is a multi-thread, open-source relational database management system, a perfect replacement for the MySQL database system. MariaDB was maintained and developed by the MariaDB Foundation, including some of the MySQL developers.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation MariaDB database management system on a Debian 10 (Buster) server.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Debian 10 (Buster).
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install MariaDB on Debian 10

Step 1. Before we install any software, it’s important to make sure your system is up to date by running the following apt commands in the terminal:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing MariaDB on Debian 10.

Once the repositories package list is updated in your system, you can start the MariaDB installation using the below command:

sudo apt install mariadb-server

After complete, you can verify MariaDB is installed by running the below command:

sudo systemctl start mariadb
sudo systemctl status mariadb

Step 3. Secure MariaDB server.

By default, MariaDB is not hardened. You can secure MariaDB using the mysql_secure_installation script. you should read and below each step carefully which will set a root password, remove anonymous users, disallow remote root login, and remove the test database and access to secure MariaDB:

mysql_secure_installation

Configure it like this:

- Set root password? [Y/n] y
- Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
- Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
- Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
- Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y

Once you have secured your MariaDB installation, you can connect to the MySQL shell using the root user password:

mysql -u root -p

To create a database named “idroot_db” and a user named “idroot_user” with full privileges to manage the database run the following SQL commands:

MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE  idroot_db;
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL ON idroot_db.* TO 'idroot_user'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'idroot_user_passwd_here' WITH GRANT OPTION;
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
MariaDB [(none)]> exit;

Congratulations! You have successfully installed MariaDB. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the MariaDB database management system on Debian 10 (Buster). For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official MariaDB website.