Hello. Previously, Mysql was installed together while installing Virtualmin. But now when I try to install Virtualmin, it installs along with MariaDB. I don’t want to use Mariadb, I want to use Mysql. How can I install Virtualmin along with Mysql?
You cannot. We cannot and will not support old installations of Virtualmin (and repos for old installer versions are periodically deleted to prevent people from using old unsupported versions). (And, how the hell did you interpret my comment there as being a suggestion to install an old version of Virtualmin?)
Switching to MySQL is covered in several other posts in our forums (be careful about who you take advice from, as well…if it isn’t me or other staff, maybe keep reading for follow ups from one of us). If you insist on doing so, you should do some homework first.
In short:
Install Virtualmin. Don’t login to Webmin or run the installation wizard (yet).
Install MySQL from system provided packages, not third party packages unless you cannot avoid it. If you must install from third party repos, you must configure Webmin to know where to find the configuration and other support files. Never install anything from source code on a production server.
Re-run the MySQL step of the postinstall script (virtualmin config-system --include MySQL).
Now run the installation setup wizard.
You’re probably done. Double check to be sure the MySQL module recognizes that you have MySQL and not Mariadb (there may be some cached names in the menus, but those are all cosmetic…the same Webmin module is used for both MySQL and Mariadb because they are almost identical from a user perspective).
I want to be clear you almost certainly should not do this. But, this is how you do it, if you must.
The same thing you’d do on any major database upgrade (whether between major versions of MySQL or from MySQL to Mariadb): Dump and restore. Virtualmin handles backups of databases using dump and restore, so most of the time it’ll just work, even going from MySQL to Mariadb or back, when you restore a Virtualmin backup to a new system that is also running Virtualmin, even if one had MySQL and the new one has Mariadb.
The two databases have diverged more in recent years, however, so it is possible to run into compatibility issues when restoring…those compatibility issues are more pronounced now than in old versions. So, if you have an old MySQL version, and you migrate to a new Mariadb version, it should be relatively painless. Going from a new MySQL to a new Mariadb is likely moderately harder (but still usually do-able with minor tweaks). The divergence is almost entirely on the MySQL side of things, and MySQL has made incompatible changes that Mariadb has not made…you may even see compatibility issues you need to manually fix when upgrading to new major MySQL versions from old MySQL versions.
If I were responsible for MySQL database-backed sites (I was), I would prefer migrating to Mariadb over upgrading to MySQL 8 (I did, we no longer have any MySQL databases), because MySQL 8 is going to make you work harder.