Installing and Securing MariaDB on Ubuntu Bionic

This tutorial describes how to install the latest version of MariaDB on an Ubuntu Bionic server.

Requirements:
You have an account and are logged into console.scaleway.com
You have an Ubuntu Bionic server
You have configured your SSH Key
You have sudo privileges or access to the root user.

MariaDB Overview

MariaDB is a fork of the MySQL (Structured Query Language) relational database management system which allows switching from MySQL to MariaDB without having to alter your applications since the data and data structures will not need to change.

This means that:

Data and table definition files (.frm) files are binary compatible.
All client APIs, protocols, and structs are identical.
All filenames, binaries, paths, ports, sockets should be the same.
All MySQL connectors work unchanged with MariaDB.
The mysql-client package also works with MariaDB server.

Even the command line tools are similar to mysqldump and mysqladmin still having the original names, allowing MariaDB to be a drop-in replacement.

Installing MariaDB

1 . Connect to your server using SSH

ssh root@SERVER_IP

If you do not know your server IP, you can list your existing servers using scw ps (Scaleway CLI).

Type yes when prompted to confirm that we wish to proceed. If the Scaleway CLI is not installed, you have several options:

(Preferred) On Mac OS using Homebrew and launching brew install scw

On Mac OS using a manual install

Install the latest stable release on Mac OS X manually:
# prepare for first install and upgrade
mkdir -p /usr/local/bin
mv /usr/local/bin/scw /tmp/scw.old
# get latest release
wget "https://github.com/scaleway/scaleway-cli/releases/download/v1.16/scw-darwin-amd64" -O /usr/local/bin/scw
# test
scw version
Install the latest release on Linux:
# get latest release
export ARCH=amd64  # can be 'i386', 'amd64' or 'armhf'
wget "https://github.com/scaleway/scaleway-cli/releases/download/v1.16/scw_1.16_${ARCH}.deb" -O /tmp/scw.deb
dpkg -i /tmp/scw.deb && rm -f /tmp/scw.deb
# test
scw version

On Windows by downloading the scw-windows-amd64.exe

Note: If you use the root user, you can remove the sudo before each command.

2 . Update Ubuntu packet manager

sudo apt-get update

3 . Upgrade the Ubuntu packages already installed

sudo apt-get upgrade

4 . Install MariaDB server and MariaDB client

sudo apt-get install mariadb-server mariadb-client

Managing MariaDB Database Server

The lines below allow you to stop, start and enable MariaDB server to automatically start up everytime you reboot your machine.

sudo systemctl stop mysql

sudo systemctl start mysql

sudo systemctl enable mysql

Securing MariaDB

This program enables you to improve the security of your MySQL installation in the following ways:

You can set a password for root accounts.
You can remove root accounts that are accessible from outside the localhost.
You can remove anonymous-user accounts.
You can remove the test database (which by default can be accessed by all users, even anonymous users), and privileges that permit anyone to access databases with names that start with test_.

mysql_secure_installation

Enter current password for root: Press Enter for none.
Set root password? Y
Create and confirm a new password
Remove anonymous users? Y
Disallow root login remotely? Y
Remove test database and access to it? Y
Reload privilege tables now? Y

To log in to MariaDB database server, run the command:

mysql -u root -p

Resetting Your MariaDB Root Password

If you forget or lose the root password to your MariaDB database, you can still gain access and reset the password if you have access to the server and a sudo-enabled user account.

Depending on the database used and its version, you’ll need to use different commands to recover the root password.

1 . Determine the SQL version

mysql --version

Which returns

mysql  Ver 15.1 Distrib 10.1.29-MariaDB, for debian-linux-gnu (x86_64) using readline 5.2

Note which database and which version you are running, as you will need it later.

2 . Shut down the database server to change the root password

sudo systemctl stop mariadb

If you run MySQL and MariaDB without loading information about user privileges, it allows you to access the database command line with root privileges without providing a password. It enables to gain access to the database without knowing it.

3 . Start the database without loading the grant tables or enabling networking:

sudo mysqld_safe --skip-grant-tables --skip-networking &

Note: The ampersand at the end of this command will make this process run in the background so you can continue to use your terminal.

4 . Connect to the database as the root user (the password should not be required)

mysql -u root

Which returns

Welcome to the MariaDB monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MariaDB connection id is 2
Server version: 10.1.29-MariaDB-6 Ubuntu 18.04

Copyright (c) 2000, 2017, Oracle, MariaDB Corporation Ab and others.

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

MariaDB [(none)]>

5 . Reload the grant tables by issuing the FLUSH PRIVILEGES command

FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

6 . Change the root password

Note: Make sure to replace new_password with your new password of choice.

For MySQL 5.7.6 and newer as well as MariaDB 10.1.20 and newer:

ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'new_password';

For MySQL 5.7.5 and older as well as MariaDB 10.1.20 and older, use:

SET PASSWORD FOR 'root'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('new_password');

If the ALTER USER command does not work, run

UPDATE mysql.user SET authentication_string = PASSWORD('new_password') WHERE User = 'root' AND Host = 'localhost';

Which, in any case should return:

Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0

7 . Reload the grant tables by issuing the FLUSH PRIVILEGES command

8 . Restart the database server

sudo kill `cat /var/run/mariadb/mariadb.pid`

9 . Restart the service

sudo systemctl start mariadb

10 . Confirm that the new password has been applied correctly

mysql -u root -p