Installing the latest MySQL 5.6 on Amazon Linux using official repos

In case you missed the announcement Monday, there are now official yum repositories for Fedora 18, 19 and Enterprise Linux 6 (Red Hat and Oracle Linux).

In my case however, I often use Amazon Web Services, and I find that Amazon Linux is just a little bit friendlier to use, since it has better mirror configuration out of the box.

The good news for me is that the official MySQL yum repositories (unofficially) work just fine. Here is an example installation:

sudo yum localinstall http://repo.mysql.com/mysql-community-release-el6-3.noarch.rpm
sudo yum install mysql-community-server
sudo service mysqld start

Configure mysqld to start on boot:

sudo chkconfig mysqld on
chkconfig --list mysqld

And that’s it, you’re all set up and running. One thing I noticed, is the configuration file included is very clean! This is because MySQL has improved all the defaults in 5.6:

# For advice on how to change settings please see
# http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/server-configuration-defaults.html

[mysqld]
#
# Remove leading # and set to the amount of RAM for the most important data
# cache in MySQL. Start at 70% of total RAM for dedicated server, else 10%.
# innodb_buffer_pool_size = 128M
#
# Remove leading # to turn on a very important data integrity option: logging
# changes to the binary log between backups.
# log_bin
#
# Remove leading # to set options mainly useful for reporting servers.
# The server defaults are faster for transactions and fast SELECTs.
# Adjust sizes as needed, experiment to find the optimal values.
# join_buffer_size = 128M
# sort_buffer_size = 2M
# read_rnd_buffer_size = 2M
datadir=/var/lib/mysql
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

# Disabling symbolic-links is recommended to prevent assorted security risks
symbolic-links=0

# Recommended in standard MySQL setup
sql_mode=NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION,STRICT_TRANS_TABLES

[mysqld_safe]
log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log
pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid

It doesn’t get much simpler than this. I love it!

Norvald has also blogged about some of the other improvements to the packaging (systemd, tmpfiles.d, SELinux, multilib).