MySQL Docker Image Overview

Start a mysql server instance

Starting a MySQL instance is simple:

docker run --name some-mysql -p 33060:3306 -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=my-secret-pw -d mysql:tag

where some-mysql is the name you want to assign to your container, my-secret-pw is the password to be set for the MySQL root user and tag is the tag specifying the MySQL version you want. See the list above for relevant tags.

Using a custom MySQL configuration file

The default configuration for MySQL can be found in /etc/mysql/my.cnf, which may !includedir additional directories such as /etc/mysql/conf.d or /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d. Please inspect the relevant files and directories within the mysql image itself for more details.

If /my/custom/config-file.cnf is the path and name of your custom configuration file, you can start your mysql container like this (note that only the directory path of the custom config file is used in this command):

$ docker run --name some-mysql -v /my/custom:/etc/mysql/conf.d -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=my-secret-pw -d mysql:tag

This will start a new container some-mysql where the MySQL instance uses the combined startup settings from /etc/mysql/my.cnf and /etc/mysql/conf.d/config-file.cnf, with settings from the latter taking precedence.

Creating database dumps

Most of the normal tools will work, although their usage might be a little convoluted in some cases to ensure they have access to the mysqld server. A simple way to ensure this is to use docker exec and run the tool from the same container, similar to the following:

docker exec some-mysql sh -c 'exec mysqldump --all-databases -uroot -p"$MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD"' > /some/path/on/your/host/all-databases.sql

Restoring data from dump files

For restoring data. You can use docker exec command with -i flag, similar to the following:

docker exec -i some-mysql sh -c 'exec mysql -uroot -p"$MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD"' < /some/path/on/your/host/all-databases.sql

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