As touched upon briefly when configuring CentOS for use with Maria DB, there is no native MySQL package in the CentOS 7 yum repository. To account for this, we will need to add a MySQL hosted repository.

MariaDB vs MySQL On CentOS Linux

One thing to note is MySQL will require a different set of base dependencies from MariaDB. Also using MySQL will break the concept and philosophy of CentOS: production packages designed for maximum reliability.

So when deciding whether to use Maria or MySQL one should weigh two options: Will my current DB Schema work with Maria? What advantage does installing MySQL over Maria give me?

Maria components are 100% transparent to MySQL structure, with some added efficiency with better licensing. Unless a compelling reason comes along, it is advised to configure CentOS to use MariaDB.

The biggest reasons for favoring Maria on CentOS are −

• Most people will be using MariaDB. When experiencing issues you will get more assistance with Maria.

• CentOS is designed to run with Maria. Hence, Maria will offer better stability.

• Maria is officially supported for CentOS.

Download and Add the MySQL Repository

We will want to download and install the MySQL repository from −

http://repo.mysql.com/mysql-community-release-el7-5.noarch.rpm

Step 1 − Download the Repository.

The repository comes conveniently packaged in an rpm package for easy installation. It can be downloaded with wget −

[root@centos]# wget http://repo.mysql.com/mysql-community-release-el75.noarch.rpm
   --2017-02-26 03:18:36--  http://repo.mysql.com/mysql-community-release-el75.noarch.rpm
   Resolving repo.mysql.com (repo.mysql.com)... 104.86.98.130

Step 2 − Install MySQL From YUM.

We can now use the yum package manager to install MySQL −

[root@centos]# yum -y install mysql-server

Step 3 − Start and Enable the MySQL Daemon Service.

[root@centos]# systemctl start mysql 
[root@centos]# systemctl enable  mysql

Step 4 − Make sure our MySQL service is up and running.

[root@centos]# netstat -antup | grep 3306 
tcp6       0       0 :::3306       :::*       LISTEN       6572/mysqld
[root@centos]#

Note − We will not allow any firewall rules through. It”s common to have MySQL configured to use Unix Domain Sockets. This assures only the web-server of the LAMP stack, locally, can access the MySQL database, taking out a complete dimension in the attack vector at the database software.