How to run MySQL as a normal user.

mysqld (the MySQL server) can be started and run by any user. In order to change mysqld to run as user USER, you'd have to the following:

• Stop the server if it's running
• Change the database directories so that USER has read and write privileges privileges to them: shell> chown -R USER /your/path/to/mysql/var
• start the server as user USER or if you are using MySQL 3.22 start mysqld as root and use the --user='name of user' switch. mysqld will switch to run as the given user before accepting any connections.
• If you are using mysql.server to start mysqld when the system is rebooted, you should change mysql.server to call 'su' to user USER or use the --user switch.

You don't have to do anything to safe_mysqld to not run as root.

At this point, your mysqld process should be running fine and dandy as user 'USER'. One thing hasn't changed though - the access permissions. By default (right after running the permissions table install script), only user 'root' has access permission to the database. Unless you have changed that, it's still true. This shouldn't stop you from accessing MySQL when you're logged in under a user other than root, just specify -u root to the client program. Note that accessing MySQL as root, by supplying -u root in the command line, doesn't have ANYTHING to do with MySQL running as root, as a user or as anyone else. The access permissions and userbase of MySQL are completely separate from the UNIX users. The only connection to the UNIX users is if you don't use the -u option to clients. In this case the client will try to login into MySQL with your UNIX login name. If your UNIX box itself isn't secured, you should probably at least put a password on the root users in the MySQL access tables, since any johndoe user can run 'mysql -u root dbname' and do whatever he likes.

Go to the first, previous, next, last section, table of contents.