Starting MySQL Automatically on Red Hat Linux

by Nathan Wallace (Oct 25, 1999)
and Dean Peters (Dec 5, 2000)

Introduction

After you've installed MySQL it's often a good and convenient idea to make it start and stop automatically with the machine. These instructions are specific for Red Hat Linux and it's variants since different Linux distributions tend to layout the start up scripts differently.

The example script is based on my MySQL installation instructions.

Making MySQL Start and Stop Automatically

You need to be root to do these steps:
```
    su root
```
Now go to the MySQL directory:
```
    cd /usr/local/mysql
```

First we have to put the start up script with all the others.

    cp support-files/mysql.server /etc/rc.d/init.d/mysql

To make the script be run on machine start up we need to create a symbolic link to it.

    cd /etc/rc.d/rc3.d
    ln -s ../init.d/mysql S85mysql
    cd /etc/rc.d/rc5.d
    ln -s ../init.d/mysql S85mysql

Now the links to make MySQL shut down:

    cd /etc/rc.d/rc0.d
    ln -s ../init.d/mysql K85mysql
    cd /etc/rc.d/rc6.d
    ln -s ../init.d/mysql K85mysql

The mysql script must have execute permissions before it will work.
```
    cd ../init.d
    chmod +x mysql
```
You may need to change the user that mysql should be run as. Look for the mysqld_user variable about half way through the script and change it to be the appropriate user. If you used our MySQL install instructions the user should be mysql.
You can now reboot your machine to test this setup.
```
    shutdown -r now
```

When the machine starts, check that the mysql daemon actually started:

    cd /usr/local/mysql
    bin/mysqladmin -uroot -p[admin password  eg. mypass] ping

Hopefully you get this response:

    mysqld is alive

If you get a message like this then something went wrong:

    mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed
    error: 'Can't connect to local MySQL server (2)'
    Check that mysqld is running and that the socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' exists!