Devlog

I accidentally deleted my MySQL root user today on one of my dev servers. I thought I'd write a quickie about how I restored it.

The basic information I gathered from the MySQL manual, but of course I needed to restore the account, not just reset the password. It's a simple matter of replacing that init file with the proper SQL to create the user.

root# /etc/init.d/mysqld stop
root# su mysql
mysql$ pwd
/home/mysql
mysql$ echo "GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'my_pass' WITH GRANT OPTION;"> mysql-init
mysql$ mysqld_safe --init-file=/home/mysql/mysql-init &
mysql$ rm mysql-init
mysql$ mysql -uroot -p   # woot, works

(Note that it's important that you switch to the same user that MySQL uses when running mysqld_safe. This might be 'mysql' or something else, you'll need to check out your init files to see.)