DEV Community: Anthony Gilbert

How to Install and Configure MySQL on Ubuntu

Anthony Gilbert — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 05:13:16 +0000

MySQL is one of the most popular relational database management systems. In this post, we’ll walk through a simple process to install and set up MySQL on Ubuntu.

Step 1: Update Your Package List
Before installing any new packages, update your local package index:

sudo apt update

Step 2: Install MySQL Server
Install MySQL by running:

sudo apt install mysql-server

This command installs the MySQL server package and any required dependencies.

Step 3: Secure Your MySQL Installation
After installation, run the built-in security script to improve your MySQL configuration:

sudo mysql_secure_installation

You’ll be prompted to configure settings like:

Validating password plugins
Setting a strong root password
Removing anonymous users
Disabling remote root login
Removing the test database
Answer the prompts according to your security needs.

Step 4: Verify MySQL is Running
Check the status of the MySQL service to ensure it’s active:

sudo systemctl status mysql

If MySQL isn’t running, start it with:

sudo systemctl start mysql

Step 5: Log Into MySQL
Access the MySQL shell using the root account:

sudo mysql

From here, you can execute SQL commands to create databases, users, and manage your database server.

Step 6: Create a New Database and User (Optional)
For added security and organization, it’s a good idea to create a dedicated database and user rather than using the root account. Here’s an example:

Create a new database:

CREATE DATABASE my_database;

Create a new user and grant privileges:

CREATE USER 'myuser'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'mypassword';
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON my_database.* TO 'myuser'@'localhost';
FLUSH PRIVILEGES;

Replace my_database, myuser, and mypassword with your desired names and secure password.

React vs Vue - Which should you choose?

Anthony Gilbert — Tue, 05 Jul 2022 18:43:00 +0000

Choose Vue.

Install and config PostgreSQL on Ubuntu Linux

Anthony Gilbert — Fri, 25 Mar 2022 04:49:12 +0000

First we need to install PostgreSQL
sudo apt get install postgresql postgresql-contrib

Now we check the path for PostgreSQL(for me it is version 12, it might be different for you)
ls /etc/postgresql/12/main/

This allows us to check all of the commands available to us
service postgresql

This will allow us to check the status
service postgresql status

This will log us in as the default user
sudo su postgres

Now if we run psql we will enter the postgresql cli.

From here, you can run \l to see the default databases.

You can also run \du to list all of the users.

To change the password of the default user 'postgres', run ALTER USER postgres WITH PASSWORD 'test123';

To create a new user:
CREATE USER nova_glow WITH PASSWORD 'test123';

Now if we want to give our new user "super" access...
ALTER USER nova_glow WITH SUPERUSER;

If You want to remove a user, simply do the following:
DROP USER user_2;

If you want to see all of the available commands for psql, you can simply run man psql in a new shell.

Note: It is recommended to install pgadmin from the software center.

Setting up a Symfony application using Docker.

Anthony Gilbert — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 08:53:53 +0000

In this blog we are going to be setting up a Symfony application inside of a Docker container. If you have not previously worked with a plain Docker file, you can follow my last post here.

At this point we should have our container running, and inside of our container we can run the following commands.

To create our own docker container we need to create two new files:

docker-compose.yml
nginx.conf

The docker-compose.yml should contain the following code

version: '3'
services:
    web:
        image: nginx:latest
        ports:
            - "80:80"
        volumes:
            - ./nginx.conf:/etc/nginx/conf.d/nginx.conf
            - ./app:/app
    php:
        image: php:fpm
        volumes:
            - ./app:/app

In order for this to work, you need to create an 'app' folder and inside of that, you need to create a 'public' folder, inside of that you can create your index.html file.

As for the 2nd file mentioned, you need to add the following code:

server {
    listen 80 default_server;
    root /app/public;
}

This will start the container server and tell the container which directory to point to.
Once we have done this we need to create a index.php file inside of the /app/public directory.

Inside of our newly created index.php file, we need to copy/paste the following:

<?php
phpinfo();

Now we need to re-run the server using docker-compose up.

After restarting the docker container we should see PHP manual page.
If you see this, then congratulations, you have successfully created your PHP Docker container!! 🎊 🎊

Now that we have our basic PHP container, we can add Symfony to it.

To do this we need to stop the server by using the control + c command.

Afterwards we want to run the following command: curl -LO https://raw.githubusercontent.com/bitnami/bitnami-docker-symfony/master/docker-compose.yml

This will download Bitnami's official Symfony docker-compose.yml image. Once this command has finished, we can re-run docker-compose up to run the build process. This is going to take some time, so feel free to grab a beverage.

Once it has finished, you can visit localhost:8000 to visit your newly generated Symfony app. Which should look like this
And you're done!!

-Anthony
Follow me on twitter

Setting up apache with Docker for frontend development.

Anthony Gilbert — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 08:52:32 +0000

In this part, we are going to be setting up a plain Docker container(just HTML).

To get started, the first thing we want to do is install Docker. You can do this by downloading it from the Docker website.

To get started we will create an empty directory by typing mkdir <project-name> and then cd into that directory.

Once we have cd' into our new directory, we will create a new Docker file by typing touch Dockerfile into the terminal. Once the file is created you can open it with your favorite editor and paste the following code inside of it.

FROM ubuntu:18.04
MAINTAINER Faithful <faithful@infused.io>
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y apache2 && apt-get clean && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/*
ENV APACHE_RUN_USER  www-data
ENV APACHE_RUN_GROUP www-data
ENV APACHE_LOG_DIR   /var/log/apache2
ENV APACHE_PID_FILE  /var/run/apache2/apache2.pid
ENV APACHE_RUN_DIR   /var/run/apache2
ENV APACHE_LOCK_DIR  /var/lock/apache2
ENV APACHE_LOG_DIR   /var/log/apache2
RUN mkdir -p $APACHE_RUN_DIR
RUN mkdir -p $APACHE_LOCK_DIR
RUN mkdir -p $APACHE_LOG_DIR
COPY index.html /var/www/html
EXPOSE 80
CMD ["/usr/sbin/apache2", "-D", "FOREGROUND"]

Once you have done this, we need to run touch index.html and then copy/paste the following code into our newly created html file.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <title>First APP</title>
</head>
<body>
    <h1>Hello from Docker!</h1>
</body>
</html>

Now that we have configured a basic Dockerfile, we need to build the image by typing docker build -t <project-name> . into the terminal afterwards you should see your new image in the output.

Once the command has finished, we should now have a new image. You can double check this by typing docker images into the terminal.

Now to run our new image we need to type the following: docker run -d -p 80:80 <project name>. You will know that the image has been built successfully when it return a unique identifier.

Congratulations! 🥳
You have successfully created a Docker container with just an HTML file!! From here you can add your own libraries.

To visit the newly created UI, go to http://localhost/index.html

How to set up Symfony & then Dockerize it.

Anthony Gilbert — Tue, 14 Dec 2021 08:48:01 +0000

In this post we are going to be setting up a Symfony Docker environment. If you don't know what Symfony is, it's a PHP framework.

To get started we will install PHP, in this example we will be using PHP version 7.3. To do this you can install by typing the following:
brew install php

After install PHP we need to install composer, which is the PHP package manager. To do this we can copy-paste the following into the terminal.

php -r "copy('https://getcomposer.org/installer', 'composer-setup.php');"
php -r "if (hash_file('sha384', 'composer-setup.php') === 'dac665fdc30fdd8ec78b38b9800061b4150413ff2e3b6f88543c636f7cd84f6db9189d43a81e5503cda447da73c7e5b6') { echo 'Installer verified'; } else { echo 'Installer corrupt'; unlink('composer-setup.php'); } echo PHP_EOL;"
php composer-setup.php
php -r "unlink('composer-setup.php');"

You can run the following command to check if your system meets the Symfony requirements. symfony check:requirements

To create our Symfony project we will run the following command. symfony new my_project_name --full

Now to start our web server, we will run this command. symfony server:start, now your web server should be running on default port, 8000.

Now that we have our default application built, we need to install Docker. To do this you can run the following command in your terminal: brew install docker or visit the Docker website and download the executable.

Now we need to add a Dockerfile to the root of our project. You can do this by typing touch Dockerfile.

After creating your Dockerfile you will need to paste the following code into your Dockerfile. Code

# Dockerfile
FROM php:7.2-cli

RUN apt-get update -y && apt-get install -y libmcrypt-dev

RUN curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer
RUN docker-php-ext-install pdo mbstring

WORKDIR /app
COPY . /app

RUN composer install

EXPOSE 8000
CMD php bin/console server:run 0.0.0.0:8000

To build our php Symfony docker container, we will use the docker build command and provide a tag or a name for the container, so we can reference it later when we want to run it. The final part of the command tells Docker which directory to build from.

docker build -t symfony-tutorial .

After running the build command, you need to create the image. To do this you need to type the following: docker build -t symfony-tutorial . You can make sure that the image has been created by typing docker images into the terminal.

Now that the docker image has been created, you can run your docker image and upon doing so, it will start the web server.
Here is how you do it: docker build -t symfony-tutorial .

Now your docker environment is running on port 8000!!

Happy coding!!

-Anthony