How to install MySQL 5.6 on Ubuntu 14.04

Ubuntu 14.04 comes with both MySQL 5.5 and MySQL 5.6 and by default uses MySQL 5.5. However, you can upgrade to MySQL 5.6 by doing the following steps:

Step 1 – Take a backup!

mysqldump -u root --all-databases > /home/me/add_databases.sql

Step 2 – Remove the old MySQL
I recommend using ‘apt-get purge’ rather than ‘apt-get remove’ to uninstall the old MySQL server. Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean all your data in /var/lib/mysql will be deleted. The purge command just removes all the configuration files in /etc/mysql/ . This is important because some old MySQL configurations aren’t supported in 5.6.

If you have an unsupport configuration option (for example: table_cache was renamed table_open_cache) MySQl doesn’t silently ignore these settings… it simply doesn’t start. Oh and it doesn’t show any warnings. So you really should remove any list in /etc/mysqal/conf.d . You can read the list of settings that might have changed.

So…

apt-get purge mysql-server-5.5 mysql-client-5.5
apt-get autoremove

Step 3 – Install the new MySQL 5.6

sudo apt-get install mysql-server-5.6 mysql-client-5.6

And you are done. Hurray.

p.s. For interest, you can see which repository these packages are in from using the ‘apt-cache policy’ command:

sudo apt-cache policy mysql-server

mysql-server:
  Installed: 5.5.38-0ubuntu0.14.04.1
  Candidate: 5.5.38-0ubuntu0.14.04.1
  Version table:
 *** 5.5.38-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates/main amd64 Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-security/main amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     5.5.35+dfsg-1ubuntu1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/main amd64 Packages

sudo apt-cache policy mysql-server-5.6

mysql-server-5.6:
  Installed: (none)
  Candidate: 5.6.17-0ubuntu0.14.04.1
  Version table:
     5.6.17-0ubuntu0.14.04.1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-updates/universe amd64 Packages
        500 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty-security/universe amd64 Packages
     5.6.16-1~exp1 0
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ trusty/universe amd64 Packages

6 thoughts to “How to install MySQL 5.6 on Ubuntu 14.04”

  1. Thank you very much, this solved my problem and i did’t need to import old database.
    It’s run very smooth and no headache. Many thanks James 😀

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