MySQL service doesn’t start in Catalina OSX

catalinaMySQL

Installed MySQL 8.0.18 from a dmg file downloaded from the official site. The service won't start when manually started from the new Preferences icon added by the installer. Running sudo /usr/local/mysql/support-files/mysql.server start dies with this error message:

Starting MySQL .. ERROR! The server quit without updating PID file

I tried setting file and dir ownership of /usr/local/mysql/ to the _mysql user, and giving write permissions to /usr/local/mysql/data/ as per other answers suggested but that didn't fix the issue.

Edit: Forgot to make clear this is on macOS Catalina, I think this is highly relevant as this version brought revised security policies setting how/if each app can write to disk.

Best Answer

After hours investigating I found this post from Michael Fraase: https://discourse.brew.sh/t/mysql-8-0-18-on-catalina-wont-run-as-service/6015/2

I just added:

[mysqld]
user=root

to /etc/my.cnf (or where you have your .cnf file) and it solved it (I can not believe it).

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MySQL service is grey under Server Admin

The plist which serverAdmin uses to store the status of the service is missing some keys.

take a look at /Library/Preferences/com.apple.MySQLService.plist

it should look like:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
    <key>activeDBPath</key>
    <string>/var/mysql</string>
    <key>selectedDBPath</key>
    <string>/var/mysql</string>
    <key>serviceRunning</key>
    <true/>
    <key>serviceStart</key>
    <date>2011-07-27T14:24:23Z</date>
</dict>
</plist>

Probably yours is missing the serviceStart key

I've had this happen before, though I don't know why.

MySQL won’t start on Snow Leopard

Change skip-locking to skip-external-locking in /etc/my.cnf. This problem can happen if you had a different MySQL installed previously. I experienced this problem when I moved to MAMP.

Best Answer

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MySQL service is grey under Server Admin

MySQL won’t start on Snow Leopard

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