Additional languages
« 2.4.8.9 Starting the Server for the First Time
2.4.8.11 Starting MySQL as a Windows Service »
Section Navigation      [Toggle]

2.4.8.10. Starting MySQL from the Windows Command Line

The MySQL server can be started manually from the command line. This can be done on any version of Windows.

To start the mysqld server from the command line, you should start a console window (or “DOS window”) and enter this command: 

C:\> "C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\bin\mysqld"

The path to mysqld may vary depending on the install location of MySQL on your system.

On non-NT versions of Windows, this command starts mysqld in the background. That is, after the server starts, you should see another command prompt. If you start the server this way on Windows NT, 2000, XP, or 2003, the server runs in the foreground and no command prompt appears until the server exits. Because of this, you should open another console window to run client programs while the server is running.

You can stop the MySQL server by executing this command: 

C:\> "C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\bin\mysqladmin" -u root shutdown

Note: If the MySQL root user account has a password, you need to invoke mysqladmin with the -p option and supply the password when prompted.

This command invokes the MySQL administrative utility mysqladmin to connect to the server and tell it to shut down. The command connects as the MySQL root user, which is the default administrative account in the MySQL grant system. Note that users in the MySQL grant system are wholly independent from any login users under Windows.

If mysqld doesn't start, check the error log to see whether the server wrote any messages there to indicate the cause of the problem. The error log is located in the C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\data directory. It is the file with a suffix of .err. You can also try to start the server as mysqld --console; in this case, you may get some useful information on the screen that may help solve the problem.

The last option is to start mysqld with the --standalone and --debug options. In this case, mysqld writes a log file C:\mysqld.trace that should contain the reason why mysqld doesn't start. See Creating Trace Files.

Use mysqld --verbose --help to display all the options that mysqld understands.


User Comments

Posted by [name withheld] on March 19 2005 5:06pm[Delete] [Edit]

if you don't mind having the winmysqladmin tool sitting in your taskbar, you can use the start command:

> start c:\mysql\bin\winmysqladmin

This will give you the prompt back.

Since my windows dev machine handles multiple environments, I need this in a bat script to start my web environment with a single move:

start c:\mysql\bin\winmysqladmin
"c:\program files\apache group\apache\apache" -k start
exit

Then have the shutdown script do the reverse to stop them both.

Mike

Posted by Smita Deore Kelvekar on June 29 2005 12:23am[Delete] [Edit]

"mysqladmin -u root shutdown"
gave me the following error, since I had set a password while configuring the MySQL server instance -

mysqladmin: connect to server at 'localhost' failed
error: 'Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: NO)'

To specify password, I used the -p option in the command as follows - "mysqladmin -u root -p shutdown"

This prompted me for a password, and the shutdown was succesful.

Smita

Posted by lakhya phukan on December 3 2005 5:09am[Delete] [Edit]

I have tested the following script in a batch file to start both apache and mysql in a development machine (windows 98 platform).

start c:\apache\apache
start c:\mysql\bin\mysqld-opt

To shutdown both apache and mysql i used the folloing script:

c:\apache\apache -k shutdown
c:\mysql\bin\mysqladmin -u root shutdown

Works fine for me.

Posted by Anthony on December 14 2005 11:46pm[Delete] [Edit]

The above command-line examples try to execute commands with spaces in the path; such commands should be quoted:

C:\> "C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 4.1\bin\mysqld"

Add your own comment.