How do I completely remove MySQL from a linux installation?

Question

I was surprised to find that one of my privileged users installed MySQL on a linux box. The server (mysqld) is running and doing nothing. My skills are all in Oracle, so I am unfamiliar with how to shutdown and remove the MySQL installation.

Answer 1

You didn't mention what distribution you are using, but if they installed it via yum on a RedHat based distribution you can remove with:

yum remove mysql-server

If they installed it in their own user space you would just remove the binary files that are running the server. If it is on Debian/Ubuntu you would use the method sparks mentioned. I would also alternatively use:

killall mysqld; killall mysqld_safe

Answer 2

It all depends on how the original user installed the package. If they used the operating system's built in package management, it should be as easy as the yum line in Dave's answer or on a Debian-based system (including Ubuntu), you can use:

apt-get remove mysql-server

(As an aside, use purge instead of remove if you also want to remove custom configuration files)

If you don't know the exact package name to remove on Ubuntu:

dpkg -l|grep mysql

If the user in question did not use a package management tool, then the only real solution is to simply ensure that the server doesn't load on startup (chkconfig or update-rc.d are two handy tools for that -- check their man pages) and manually remove all the installed files.

Answer 3

If the user happened to set up any databases, you might need to remove those as well. In package base installation of MySQL, the table files can be found in /var/lib/mysql. If they are elsewhere, you can just search for the table files. They will have a .frm extension, and should be contained in a directory named after the database they are associated with.

Answer 4

Depending on your distribution you should have the option to shut it down with an init script in "/etc/init.d/mysql stop". If this fails you can kill the processes with something similar to "for i in ps -ef |grep mysqld |awk '{print $2}'; do kill -9 $i; done"

It will really be dependent on how they installed it for how you removed it. If you are running a debian based distribution: "sudo apt-get remove mysqld"

Per Zoredache's comment you can also do:"sudo apt-get purge mysqld" which would also remove configuration files.

Answer 5

Maybe the user himself doesn't know that he installed mysql. It can happen if mysql is a dependency of some other program. Have a look at the package manager logfile, ex: for a redhat check /var/log/yum.log. You will probably find some more packages installed at the same time. You can then deduce what the user wanted to do, and maybe you also want to remove some other packages too that you weren't aware of the installation!

On a recent redhat you can for example run "yum history list", then after you found the date of installation in /var/log/yum.log, you can deduce which yum operation was related to the mysql installation, and you can for example "yum history info operation_number" to get details of the installation, or "yum history undo operation_number" to revert the operation and uninstall the related packages.

Answer 6

Maybe the user himself doesn't know that he installed mysql. It can happen if mysql is a dependency of some other program. Have a look at the package manager logfile, ex: for a redhat check /var/log/yum.log. You will probably find some more packages installed at the same time. You can then deduce what the user wanted to do, and maybe you also want to remove some other packages too that you weren't aware of the installation!