How To Install MariaDB on Linux Mint 20

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MariaDB on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, MariaDB is a free and open-source relational database management system (DBMS) that is considered as a successor and replacement of MySQL DBMS. This DBMS is available for all three major operating systems i.e. Linux, macOS, and Windows.

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 of the MariaDB database on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
• 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 Linux Mint 20 Ulyana

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

sudo apt update

Step 2. Installing MariaDB on Linux Mint 20.

Now we run the following command to install MariaDB on the Linux Mint system:

sudo apt install mariadb-server mariadb-client

Once successfully installed, MariaDB will start automatically. To check status type the following command:

sudo systemctl status mariadb

Step 3. Securing MariaDB.

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

NOTE: RUNNING ALL PARTS OF THIS SCRIPT IS RECOMMENDED FOR ALL MariaDB
      SERVERS IN PRODUCTION USE!  PLEASE READ EACH STEP CAREFULLY!

Enter current password for root (enter for none):
OK, successfully used password, moving on...

Set root password? [Y/n] y
New password:
Re-enter new password:
Password updated successfully!
Reloading privilege tables..
 ... Success!

Remove anonymous users? [Y/n] y
 ... Success!

Disallow root login remotely? [Y/n] y
 ... Success!

Remove test database and access to it? [Y/n] y
 - Dropping test database...
 ... Success!
 - Removing privileges on test database...
 ... Success!

Reload privilege tables now? [Y/n] y
 ... Success!

Cleaning up...
Thanks for using MariaDB!

To log into MariaDB, use the following command (note that it’s the same command you would use to log into a MariaDB database):

mysql -u root -p

Also try to create a new database, user and assign privileges to a database:

## CREATE DATABASE
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE DATABASE mydatabase;
 
## CREATE USER ACCOUNT
MariaDB [(none)]> CREATE USER 'dbusers'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'strong-your-passwd';
 
## GRANT PERMISSIONS ON DATABASE
MariaDB [(none)]> GRANT ALL ON mydb.* TO 'dbusers'@'localhost';
 
##  RELOAD PRIVILEGES
MariaDB [(none)]> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Then, restart the MariaDB database server and enable it to start on system start-up using:

sudo systemctl restart mariadb
sudo systemctl enable mariadb

Congratulations! You have successfully installed MariaDB. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the latest version of the MariaDB database server on the Linux Mint system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you to check the official MariaDB website.