Installing MariaDB on Ubuntu

MariaDB is termed a drop in replacement for MySQL – that means that you can deploy MariaDB without changing all of your client applications as MariaDB is compatible with most MySQL features and commands.

MariaDB was forked from MySQL when Oracle took over Sun Microsystems in 2010 and was born of the fear that Oracle would not adhere to the development ethos that was used by Sun. I discuss this in more detail in my blog post on MySQL alternative. There are a few gotchas with the new versioning system used by MariaDB and I’d recommend reading the blog post to familiarise yourself.

MariaDB has not yet made it into Ubuntu’s main repositories but is available as an add-in repository from MariaDB directly.

Installing MariaDB on Ubuntu couldn’t be easier – follow one of the below instructions for your version of Ubuntu.

Install MariaDB 10 on Ubuntu 14.04

Use the below commands to add the MariaDB repository to your Ubuntu 14.04 installation.

apt-get install software-properties-common
apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 0xcbcb082a1bb943db
add-apt-repository 'deb http://mirror.stshosting.co.uk/mariadb/repo/10.0/ubuntu trusty main'

Run the following commands to install MariaDB.

apt-get update
apt-get install mariadb-server

Install MariaDB 10 on Ubuntu 12.04

Use the below commands to add the MariaDB repository to your Ubuntu 14.04 installation.

apt-get install python-software-properties
apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver hkp://keyserver.ubuntu.com:80 0xcbcb082a1bb943db
add-apt-repository 'deb http://mirror.stshosting.co.uk/mariadb/repo/10.0/ubuntu precise main'

Run the following commands to install MariaDB.

apt-get update
apt-get install mariadb-server

Install a different version of MariaDB or a use a different target operating system

MariaDB supports all common Linux distributions and they maintain a repository for each. You can see the full list of distro repositories on their repository configuration tool.