Install MariaDB on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Preparation

Make sure your system is up-to-date and wget is installed. The instructions use wget to download scripts from our GitHub repository. Alternatively, if you are familiar with curl you can replace wget with curl.

sudo yum -y update
sudo yum -y install wget.

If you see a message that your machine is not registered with an entitlement server, please make sure you have attached a valid subscription to this machine before you continue. See Red Hat’s online documentation for more details.

During this installation some files will need to be edited manually. If you are familiar with vim set it as default editor with the commands below. If you are not familiar with vim please skip this and keep using the default editor.
sudo yum -y install vim
sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/editor editor /usr/bin/vim 100

(Optional) Install a password generator

By default pwgen (password generator) is not available on RHEL. To use it, you have to enable the epel (Extra Packages Enterprise Linux) repository first. Since this is an unsupported 3rd party repository, you have to install it manually. If you do not want to install these packages on your server, you can skip this step and generate secure passwords on another machine.

subscription-manager repos --enable "rhel-*-optional-rpms" --enable "rhel-*-extras-rpms"
sudo rpm -ivh https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm
sudo yum -y update
sudo yum -y install pwgen

Install MariaDB

Please use the latest stable version of MariaDB from https://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/repositories.

Choose your distribution from the available list (RedHat). Next, choose your release (Red Hat EL 7 (x86_64)), then select the latest stable version of MariaDB. At the time of writing this is version 10.3 [stable].

You should now see instructions how to install MariaDB on your distribution.

Configure MariaDB for Relution

Download the relution.cnf template from our GitHub repository and safe it to /etc/my.cnf.d/relution.cnf.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/relution-io/relution-setup/master/native/Linux/etc/my.cnf.d/relution.cnf.template
sudo mv relution.cnf.template /etc/my.cnf.d/relution.cnf
sudo chmod og-w /etc/my.cnf.d/relution.cnf

If SELinux is in enforcing mode (default) the file’s security context is wrong after the move. Run the command below to fix it. Otherwise SELinux will prevent the service from accessing the file for security reasons.

sudo restorecon -v /etc/my.cnf.d/relution.cnf

Start MariaDB and make sure the service is started automatically after a system reboot.

sudo systemctl start mariadb.service
sudo systemctl enable mariadb.service

Check installation

You should now be able to connect to this MariaDB instance. Note that for backwards compatibility reasons the command line tools still use mysql, this is not an error.

mysql -u root

You should see output similar to the one below:

Welcome to the MariaDB monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MariaDB connection id is 2
Server version: 5.5.56-MariaDB MariaDB Server

Copyright (c) 2000, 2017, Oracle, MariaDB Corporation Ab and others.

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the current input statement.

MariaDB [(none)]>

Enter this command to verify that server and database collation are set to utf8mb4 as desired:

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE '%collation%';

Make sure collation_database and collation_server show utf8mb4_general_ci.

Press Ctrl+D to disconnect from MariaDB and return to the command prompt.

Create Relution database

Next, we are going to create the relution database and an associated database user. This user is going to be used by the Relution service to connect to the database. Download the script from GitHub.

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/relution-io/relution-setup/master/native/Linux/scripts/create_database.sh --directory-prefix=/opt

Ensure the file is executable by root:

chmod 700 /opt/create_database.sh

(Optional) Use pwgen to generate a secure random password

pwgen -snc 48 1

Execute the script to create the database:

/opt/create_database.sh "relution" "<password>"

This creates a new database called relution and a new database user with the name relution that has full privileges on this database. This user is used by the Relution service to access the database. If administrative access to the database is needed for maintenance purposes we recommended to create a separate database user for this.

Make sure you save the password (excluding the quotation marks) in a secure location. You will need to configure this password later to grant Relution access to the database.

Verify that you can connect to the database as this user:

mysql -u relution -p relution

Enter the password when prompted. You should see the MariaDB prompt as above. Use Ctrl+D to sign out again.

Firewall configuration

If you’re going to install Relution on another machine, you need to open port 3306 on this machine, so Relution can talk to MariaDB. If Relution is going to be installed on the same machine you can skip these steps.

Replace ADDRESS with the IP address and netmask of the machine or network you want to grant access to this MariaDB instance. Examples: Use 192.168.0.1/32 to grant access to the machine with the IP address 192.168.0.1. Use 192.168.0.0/24 to grant access to any machine in the IP address range 192.168.0.x. When in doubt, consult your network administrator.
sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-rich-rule='rule family="ipv4" source address="###ADDRESS###" port protocol="tcp" port="3306" accept'
sudo firewall-cmd --reload