Creating a minimal MySQL installation for embedded system!

Over the last few MySQL releases the size of the MySQL package have increased in size and it looks like the trend is continuing.

• 687M MySQL 5.5.42
• 1,1G  MySQL 5.6.21
• 1,3G  MySQL 5.7.4
• 1,5G         MySQL 5.7.5

This guide is for a Linux installation. I have tested the instructions below to create a minimal installation on my Ubuntu 14.04 laptop. I know you can make it a bit smaller by running mysqld directly and only using one error message file but this would not affect total size much. I also added the mysql client to have some way of logging into MySQL.

MySQL configuration file used to start MySQL:

[mysqld_safe] ledir = /home/ted/labb/mini-mysql/bin [mysqld] port = 63301 socket = /tmp/mysql63301.sock basedir = /home/ted/labb/mini-mysql datadir = /home/ted/labb/mini-mysql/data tmpdir = /tmp pid-file = /tmp/mysql66301.pid

Create MySQL basedir where you want to store all binaries:

mkdir /home/ted/labb/mini-mysql

Go to basedir:

cd /home/ted/labb/mini-mysql

Create folders for binaries and database (normally your datadir would not be located in your basedir):

mkdir bin mkdir data

Download MySQL "Linux - Generic (glibc 2.5) (x86, 64-bit), Compressed TAR Archive" from http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/
Copy files needed to start MySQL daemon and client program:

cp ~5.6.22/bin/mysql bin/ cp ~5.6.22/bin/mysqld bin/ cp ~5.6.22/bin/mysqld_safe bin/ cp -fr ~5.6.22/share .

We need some binaries and files to create mysql internal database, these can be removed later on:

cp ~5.6.22/scripts/mysql_install_db bin/ cp ~5.6.22/bin/resolveip bin/ cp ~5.6.22/support-files/my-default.cnf .

Create MySQL internal database:

./bin/mysql_install_db --datadir=./data/

# Now we can remove tools for creating internal mysql schema:

rm bin/mysql_install_db rm bin/resolveip rm my-default.cnf rm rm my-new.cnf

Start server:

./bin/mysqld_safe --defaults-file=./my.cnf &

Log into server:

./bin/mysql -uroot -P63301 -h127.0.0.1

Total size of installation:

mysql$ du -sh * 88M     bin 3,2M    share

This is good news, with some minimal work it's still possible to get the binary package down to below 100M.

EDIT: Great news, with MySQL 8.0.16 we now have minimal packages via our normal downloads, see more here: https://mysqlrelease.com/2019/05/the-amazing-shrinking-tarball/