This guide will outlined how to install MySQL on CentOS 7. MySQL is a widely used database management platform used by various applications. Many applications such as WordPress, Joomla and others rely on MySQL databases to function. MySQL however, must be installed with a few different steps since it’s no longer the default in the CentOS repositories.

All commands without sudo

yum update -y
yum install -y wget
wget http://repo.mysql.com/mysql-community-release-el7-7.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh mysql-community-release-el7-7.noarch.rpm
yum update -y
yum install -y mysql-server
systemctl start mysqld
systemctl enable mysqld
mysql_secure_installation

All commands with sudo

sudo yum update -y
sudo yum install -y wget
sudo wget http://repo.mysql.com/mysql-community-release-el7-7.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh mysql-community-release-el7-7.noarch.rpm
sudo yum update -y
sudo yum install -y mysql-server
sudo systemctl start mysqld
sudo systemctl enable mysqld
sudo mysql_secure_installation

Prerequisites:

First, before performing any steps relating to MySQL, we always want to update the system and ensure wget is installed:

yum update -y
yum install -y wget

MySQL Installation:

After you’ve installed wget and confirmed the system has updated, we can begin with the installation of MySQL. First we’ll need to download and add the repository. You’ll want to check the latest versions here: https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/repo/yum/ and here: http://repo.mysql.com/ and update the code snippet below accordingly for the rpm.

wget http://repo.mysql.com/mysql-community-release-el7-7.noarch.rpm
rpm -ivh mysql-community-release-el7-7.noarch.rpm
yum update -y

After the repository has been added, we can proceed with installing MySQL

yum install -y mysql-server

Once installed, we’ll need to start the service and then enable it to start on boot

systemctl start mysqld
systemctl enable mysqld

MySQL has now been installed, started and should be running on your server. Please proceed to the next steps for the MySQL Secure Installation to further secure the install.

MySQL Secure Installation:

Run the following command to begin securing the MySQL install. This process will give the options to remove the anonymous accounts, set a root password (other than your server root) and also remove the test databases. We highly recommend that you select YES to all of these options in addition to setting a different MySQL root password.

mysql_secure_installation

After you have completed the installation steps above, MySQL has now been installed on your server. You can now proceed with adding & managing databases.