Mac installing MariaDB

— 2 minute read

Yesterday we installed MySQL on our Mac, however, you might be thinking what about MariaDB?

MariaDB has been known to be the next step. It's highly compatible to migrate your MySQL to MariaDB.

Luckily for us, this installation process is easier than MySQL since we can use Homebrew.

Install MariaDB on Mac with Homebrew

To install MariaDB we need to have Homebrew installed first.

If you don't have this installed follow my guide on installing Homebrew.

Open up your favorite terminal and execute the following command first to make sure Homebrew is up to date:

brew update

Then we can install MariaDB with this command:

brew install MariaDB

This will start a whole series of cool lines in your Terminal which makes you look like hackerman! Afterwards MariaDB should run on your Mac.

Hackerman gif

Once it is done, we have successfully installed MariaDB.

We can now start or stop the MariaDB service using Homebrew:

brew services start mariadb
brew services stop mariadb

Connecting to the MySQL server

Once you started the server you can run the following command to connect to the database:

mysql -uroot -p

It will ask for your password, and if correct it will show the following:

MariaDB connection

Now we can also use a tool like TablePlus to connect to our MariaDB.

Add a new MariaDB connection using the following settings

  • host: 127.0.0.1
  • user: root
  • password: You choose this in the installation
  • port: 3306 (default)

MariaDB TablePlus connection

Help, the password is wrong

I had the issue where my password didn't work because of the running instance of MySQL. First of all, stop the running MySQL instance using the Settings => MySQL interface.

Now you can run the following command:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

The sudo is important here to generate a new root password. In my case, I just made it the same as what I had.

Follow the steps it prompts everything can be answered with Yes.

Now you should be able to log in again.

Thank you for reading, and let's connect!

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