Skip navigation links
2.10.4 Dealing with Problems Compiling MySQL »
Section Navigation      [Toggle]

2.10.3. Installing from the Development Source Tree

Caution

You should read this section only if you are interested in helping us test our new code. If you just want to get MySQL up and running on your system, you should use a standard release distribution (either a binary or source distribution).

To obtain the most recent development source tree, you first need to download and install Bazaar. You can obtain Bazaar from the Bazaar VCS Website. Bazaar is supported by any platform that supports Python, and is therefore compatible with any Linux, Unix, Windows or Mac OS X host. Instructions for downloading and installing Bazaar on the different platforms are available on the Bazaar website.

All MySQL projects are hosted on Launchpad. MySQL projects, including MySQL server, MySQL Workbench and others are available from the Sun/MySQL Engineering page. For the repositories related only to MySQL server, see the MySQL Server page.

To build under Unix/Linux, you must have the following tools installed:

To build under Windows you will need a copy of Microsoft Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition, Visual Studio .Net 2003 (7.1), or Visual Studio 2005 (8.0) compiler system.

Once you have the necessary tools installed, you first need to create a local branch of the MySQL source code on your machine:

  1. To obtain a copy of the MySQL source code, you must create a new Bazaar branch. If you do not already have a Bazaar repository directory set up, you need to initialize a new directory: 

    shell> mkdir mysql-server
shell> bzr init-repo --trees mysql-server

  2. Once you have an initialized directory, you can branch from the public MySQL server repositories. To create a branch of a specific version: 

    shell> cd mysql-server
shell> bzr branch lp:mysql-server/5.1 mysql-5.1

  3. The initial download will take some time to complete, depending on the speed of your connection. Please be patient. Once you have downloaded the first tree, additional trees should take significantly less time to download.

  4. When building from the Bazaar branch, you may want to create a copy of your active branch so that you can make configuration and other changes without affecting the original branch contents. You can achieve this by branching from the original branch: 

    shell> bzr branch mysql-5.1 mysql-5.1-build

Once you have the local branch, you can start to build MySQL server from the source code. On Windows, the build process is different from Unix/Linux. To continue building MySQL on Windows, see Section 2.10.6, “Installing MySQL from Source on Windows”.

On Unix/Linux you need to use the autoconf system to create the configure script so that you can configure the build environment before building.

  1. The following example shows the typical commands required to configure a source tree. The first cd command changes location into the top-level directory of the tree; replace mysql-5.1 with the appropriate directory name.

    Note

    For MySQL 5.1.12 and earlier, you must separately configure the INNODB storage engine. You can do this by running the following command from the main source directory: 

    shell> (cd storage/innobase; autoreconf --force --install)
    shell> cd mysql-5.1
shell> autoreconf --force --install
shell> ./configure  # Add your favorite options here
shell> make

    Or you can use BUILD/autorun.sh as a shortcut for the following sequence of commands: 

    shell> aclocal; autoheader
shell> libtoolize --automake --force
shell> automake --force --add-missing; autoconf

    The command line that changes directory into the storage/innobase directory is used to configure the InnoDB storage engine. You can omit this lines if you do not require InnoDB support.

    Note

    Beginning with MySQL 5.1, code specific to storage engines has been moved under a storage directory. For example, InnoDB code is now found in storage/innobase and NDBCLUSTER code is in storage/ndb.

    If you get some strange errors during this stage, verify that you have the correct version of the libtool installed.

    A collection of our standard configuration scripts is located in the BUILD/ subdirectory. For example, you may find it more convenient to use the BUILD/compile-pentium-debug script than the preceding set of shell commands. To compile on a different architecture, modify the script by removing flags that are Pentium-specific, or use another script that may be more appropriate. These scripts are provided on an “as-is” basis. They are not officially maintained and their contents may change from release to release.

  2. When the build is done, run make install. Be careful with this on a production machine; the command may overwrite your live release installation. If you have another installation of MySQL, run ./configure with different values for the --prefix, --with-tcp-port, and --with-unix-socket-path options than those used for your production server.

  3. Play hard with your new installation and try to make the new features crash. Start by running make test. See Section 21.1.2, “MySQL Test Suite”.

  4. If you have gotten to the make stage, but the distribution does not compile, please enter the problem into our bugs database using the instructions given in Section 1.6, “How to Report Bugs or Problems”. If you have installed the latest versions of the required GNU tools, and they crash trying to process our configuration files, please report that also. However, if you execute aclocal and get a command not found error or a similar problem, do not report it. Instead, make sure that all the necessary tools are installed and that your PATH variable is set correctly so that your shell can find them.

  5. After initially copying the repository with bzr to obtain the source tree, you should use pull option to periodically update your local copy. To do this any time after you have set up the repository, use this command: 

    shell> bzr pull

  6. You can examine the changeset comments for the tree by using the log option to bzr: 

    shell> bzr log

    You can also browse changesets, comments, and source code online. To browse this information for MySQL 5.1, go to http://launchpad.net/mysql-server/.

    If you see diffs or code that you have a question about, do not hesitate to send email to the MySQL internals mailing list. See Section 1.5.1, “MySQL Mailing Lists”. Also, if you think you have a better idea on how to do something, send an email message to the list with a patch.


User Comments

Posted by Ned Wilson on June 8 2006 5:58pm[Delete] [Edit]

When compiling under Cygwin, by default, it uses automake-1.4, which it considers to be the "stable" version. In the Cygwin bash shell, cd into /etc/alternatives. Inside this directory, make sure to re-link the symlinks "aclocal" and "automake" to "/usr/bin/aclocal-1.9" and "/usr/bin/automake-1.9", respectively.

Posted by Tibor Bednarik on November 15 2006 9:27pm[Delete] [Edit]

If you develop UI, probably you have ncurses-devel installed. If not, install it before you configure. The included curses termcap library needed for configure.

Posted by Frode (se) on March 1 2007 7:20pm[Delete] [Edit]

Watch out for ./BUILD/autorun.sh running an old instance libtoolize named glibtoolize. My system had an old glibtoolize 1.5 that become selected before libtoolize 1.5.23, causing the built to break.

Add your own comment.