Dockerless Services (with Nix)

So you want an “isolated” MySQL “service” but don’t want to (or are not able to) run Docker/rkt/LXC/whatever?

Here are the tl;dr steps:

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cd /tmp
mkdir mysql-1
cd mysql-1
nix-shell -p mysql
mysql_install_db --datadir=$(pwd)
mysqld --datadir=$(pwd) --socket=$(pwd)/socket &
mysqladmin -uroot -h127.0.0.1 password <REDACTED>
mysql -uroot -p<REDACTED> -h127.0.0.1
...

Why?

My motivation for this was running a database on a machine with a specially tuned kernel that did not support containers.

How it works?

Create a new folder to host all data for your service

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cd /tmp
mkdir mysql-1
cd mysql-1

Get the binary somewehere. I use Nix due to its pure stateless nature - it allows me to have different conlicting versions on my system without any container magic.

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nix-shell -p mysql

Initialize the data structure. Mind the --datadir

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mysql_install_db --datadir=$(pwd)

Launch the server. If you want to run multiple instances you also need to specify a port number with --port here. Socket is also placed in the datadir so the init does not try to pullute in /run

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mysqld --datadir=$(pwd) --socket=$(pwd)/socket &

Finish configuration and use. Need to provide the IP here since UNIX socket is on a non-standard place.

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mysqladmin -uroot -h127.0.0.1 password <REDACTED>
mysql -uroot -p<REDACTED> -h127.0.0.1

You can now stop with

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mysqladmin -uroot -p<REDACTED> -h127.0.0.1 shutdown

Going faster

You can mount tmpfs for your datadir to make MySQL go really fast. Note your data is not persisted to your harddrive anymore - use with caution.

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mkdir mysql-1
mount -t tmpfs none mysql-1
cd mysql-1
...

Creating an in-memory filesystem is slightly more involved for MacOS users but still not too bad.

Automate all the things

With the assumption that we want to store data under /tmp and that /tmp is already tmpfs we can fully automate the script above:

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#! /usr/bin/env bash
set -e
PORT=${1:-3306}
cd $(mktemp -d)
mysql_install_db --datadir=$(pwd)
mysqld --datadir=$(pwd) --socket=$(pwd)/socket --port=$PORT &
sleep 3
mysqladmin -uroot -h127.0.0.1 password root

Or even make it self-contained and pull in the right MySQL as well

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#! /usr/bin/env nix-shell
#! nix-shell -i bash -p mysql55
set -e
PORT=${1:-3306}
cd $(mktemp -d)
mysql_install_db --datadir=$(pwd)
mysqld --datadir=$(pwd) --socket=$(pwd)/socket --port=$PORT &
sleep 3

mysqladmin -uroot -h127.0.0.1 password root

Last modified on 2017-08-30