enable binlog in MySQL on Ubuntu

Question

How can I enable binlog in mysql? The documents say to start the server with --log-bin but when I do:

service mysql start --log-bin=/binlog

I get:

start: invalid option: --log-bin=/binlog

And when I add

log-bin = /binlog

to /etc/mysql/my.cnf it doesn't log anything.

Answer 1

"service mysql start" won't accept mysql-specific options, since that's a command of the init system. You would need to pass the --log-bin to mysqld. But you should prefer specifying that in the config file ;-)

add in the [mysqld] stanza of my.cnf

log-bin = /path/to/log

and maybe:

expire-logs-days = 14
max-binlog-size  = 500M
server-id        = 1

and beware that the specified file+path must be writable by the mysql user! Your example specified /binlog. The mysql user ist surely not allowed to write files in /. You may specify a relative path like log-bin=binlog which will then create a file called binlog inside your MySQL data directory where permissions are already set up.

Answer 2

In MySQL 5.7 you will also need to add the server-id as follows

[mysqld]
 server_id=master-01
 log_bin

If you do not add the server_id option, the server will not start. This is from the MySQL 5.7 reference.

Answer 3

service mysqld stop

Edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf : Under the logging and Replication Locate log_bin. Un comment the log_bin

service mysqld start

Answer 4

You can start the server with

mysqld --log-bin=/binlog