MySQL local owner and permissions

Question

I asked this question on the MySQL forums and got no answer, so I'll try here.

I recently successfully installed the 64 bit version of mysql-5.5.8 on a MacBook Pro in the /usr/local directory.

To address a completely unrelated software (RVM actually) , I chown-ed my /usr/local directory to $USER, Which made MySQL unhappy. It complained specifically about the /usr/local/mysql/data directory, so I chown-ed that directory to _mysql:wheel.

Everything appears to work again, but it made me wonder if I would have been better off changing the owner of the whole /usr/local/mysql directory, not just the data sub-directory.

Since I neglected to make notes of what owner the default installation runs under, could someone tell me what owner and permissions the /usr/local/mysql directory is by default if you don't inadvertently screw it up? :-/

I'm guessing rwxr-xr-x would be appropriate for permissions (that's what the data directory currently has and it appears to be working fine), but reinforcement for that hunch would be appreciated.

Answer 1

I had a similar problem where, in correcting a permissions issue with /user/local, I was no longer able to see any of my databases.

This fixed it:

which mysql

Which returned

$ /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql

I then changed into the root mysql directory and reset the ownership:

cd /usr/local/mysql
sudo chown -R mysql .
sudo chgrp -R mysql .

After restarting mysql, my databases were back.

Documentation: https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/data-directory-initialization.html