- Published on
Access MySQL Without Password
- Authors
- Name
- Kevin van Zonneveld
- @kvz
If you want to do command-line MySQL administration like restoring databases or dumping statistics, you need the root account and its password. Or do you?
On Ubuntu / Debian, you don't. This is useful if you
- Have lost your password (reset it this way)
- Want to automate tasks (it's a bad idea to pass around root passwords)
So How Does This Work
Well normally you would access MySQL like this right?
$ mysql -h localhost -u root -p
# Enter password: XYZ
Or you can automate it by supplying it in the same command:
$ mysql -h localhost -u root -pXYZ
Pretty messy if you ask me.
What a lot of people don't know is that there is an account that's used by debian related systems to restart the service, perform checks, etc.
The account is called debian-sys-maint, its credentials are stored in
/etc/mysql/debian.cnf and if you have root access on a database server's shell
you're in business. You can either look up the account, or tell mysql to do it
for you:
$ mysql --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf
And Bob's your uncle.
Legacy Comments (8)
These comments were imported from the previous blog system (Disqus).
or you can store a file in your homedir named .my.cnf (or /root if you want automated backups) that looks something like this:
[mysql]
user=yourmysqlusername
password=xyz
[mysqldump]
user=root
password=xyz
this is not Debian specific.
ps. don\'t forget to chmod 600 ~/.my.cnf ;-)
I\'m not sure that the \"-p\" option is followed by password, but --password=\"pass\" is ok.
-p means \"ask for password\", and -p xyz means \"ask password and select xyz base\".
@ Tim: Thanks for sharing!
@ CrazyCat: You are right: -p xyz doesn\'t work. -pxyz does however. I\'ve updated the article accordingly.
@kevin : ok, it\'s better :) But I really prefer the password=\"mypass\" which is more explicit, imho :)
@ CrazyCat: Fair enough :)
I got many tips on MySQL from your blog. Thanks Kevin
Fine information, many thanks to the author