How do i Setup utf-8 as standard character set for a mysql server?

Question

do i have to recompile it?

i figured out diffent ways of setting the character set values see

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/charset.html

but starting it with other values or my.cnf settings changed nothing. Because if i do:

sudo mysqld --verbose --help | grep charact

it always answers me latin1 as standard charset. the system is ubuntu lts server with a standard mysql install.

Answer 1

Solution:

add this into my.cnf:

[mysqld]
character-set-server=utf8
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets
default-character-set=utf8

[mysql]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8

[mysqladmin]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8

[mysqlcheck]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8

[mysqldump]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8

[mysqlimport]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8

[mysqlshow]
character-sets-dir=/usr/share/mysql/charsets default-character-set=utf8
#end

Answer 2

[mysqld]
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'
character-set-server = utf8
skip-character-set-client-handshake

[client]
default-character-set   = utf8

[mysql]
default-character-set   = utf8

UPDATE: Nowadays you should probably use utf8mb4.