MySQL on Mac OS X Tiger

I have been toying with the idea of starting to develop using Ruby on Rails. To begin with, I knew I had the ordeal of installing MySQL on my MacBook Pro. Well, I assumed it would be a bit of a 'mare...

So, Where do I start?

Anyone who has had any experience of Mac OS X and MySQL will have heard of Marc Liyanage. Marc has published fabulous Mac friendly MySQL Binaries for a few years now So that's where I headed for first. However, Marc no longer builds these binaries, "the people at MySQL started to provide very nice official binary packages". So I trundled along and downloaded the Mac OS X 10.4 (x86) Package. I double clicked everything on the disk image, but couldn't see the database server from my old copy of the superb CocoaMySQL, so I grabbed a new copy.

I also paid special attention to Marc's important statement:

" You should at least run this command in order to secure the open master account in the default installation:"

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqladmin -u root password new_password_here

Well it was the least I could do! But wait, there is more:

"In recent distributions of MySQL, you can also run the script

mysql_secure_installation

instead of just changing the root password." You know what? I typed that in, restarted my Mac OS X 10.4.9, and presto, I could connect to my shiny new MySQL database server. Job Done, next stop Ruby on Rails...

Erm, don't try this home

The above is in no way any kind of proof-read, tried and tested tutorial. It's just a virtual piece of string, so that I can remember how to do it next time.