Deploying MySQL in a Local Development Environment

Installing MySQL via apt-get is a simple task, but the migration between different MySQL versions requires planning and testing. Thus installing one central instance of the database system might not be suitable, when the version of MySQL or project specific settings should be switched quickly without interfering with other applications. Using one central instance can quickly become cumbersome. In this article, I will describe how any number of MySQL instances can be stored and executed from within a user’s home directory.

Adapting MySQL Data an Log File Locations

Some scenarios might require to run several MySQL instances at once, other scenarios cover sensitive data, where we do not want MySQL to write any data on non-encrypted partitions. This is especially true for devices which can get easily stolen, for instance laptops. If you use a laptop for developing your applications from time to time, chances are good that you need to store sensitive data in a database, but need to make sure that the data is encrypted when at rest. The data stored in a database needs to be protected when at rest.

This can be solved with full disk encryption, but this technique has several disadvantages. First of all, full disk encryption only utilises one password. This entails, that several users who utilise a device need to share one password, which reduces the reliability of this approach. Also when the system needs to be rebooted, full disk encryption can become an obstacle, which increases the complexity further.

Way easier to use is the transparent home directory encryption, which can be selected during many modern Linux setup procedures out of the box. We will use this encryption type for this article, as it is reasonable secure and easy to setup. Our goal is to store all MySQL related data in the home directory and run MySQL with normal user privileges.

Creating the Directory Structure

The first step is creating a directory structure for storing the data. In this example, the user name is stefan, please adapt to your needs.