Thursday 28 January 2016

Installing mysql binaries in non-standard location

Well, the I've spent the last few days just trying to get the latest version of mysql installed. Yesterday I spent ages installing the latest version of gcc on the webserver, as the one installed was too old to build mysql with. (Don't I love shared hosting). GCC takes hours to build and it was also complicated by the unusual way in which it must be configured, which I wasn't aware of until after a few failed attempts at compiling it in the normal way.

Installation of mysql was further complicated by it still trying to use the old version of gcc. Following the instructions to make clean and rm CMakeCache.txt didn't help. After trying a few different things I deleted the directory and extracted the tarball again to start clean. This did work.

But after all that work, my webhost killed all my processes while mysql was still building. I guess I can't blame them - I have a 512MB plan, and the mysql build process alone was taking up nearly a gig. I tried to see if there was any way to limit the amount of memory used during make, but couldn't find anything.

So today I checked if there was any way of changing where a pre-compiled binary package could be installed to. It turns out that for rpm (the server is CentOS and mysql offers an rpm package) you can use rpm --prefix= or rpm --relocate, but mysql packages are not relocatable.

However, I later found this information about using the generic binaries: Installing MySQL on Unix/Linux Using Generic Binaries. This indicates you can just extract the tarball to your preferred installation directory, and that's it. So I did that and it worked! Could've saved myself several days work and fustration!

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