Docker Compose and MySQL DB in a Flash

2 min readFeb 8, 2021

This article shows you how to get a MySQL DB running in 5 minutes and only 4 easy steps — i.e. In A Flash. This article has nothing to do with with Barry Allen.

Im assuming the following:

You have Docker installed
You have Docker Compose installed

If you do not have these installed, check out these articles:

Step 1: Create Directories

Run the following commands to create necessary directories

mkdir -m 777 -p ./data/db ./data/mysql ./data/mounts/

Step 2: (Optional) Additional Configuration

I had a character encoding issue when importing data into the database so I had to have additional config mounted into my countainer.

Copy and run the following command:

echo "[mysqld]
character-set-server = utf8
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
skip-character-set-client-handshake" >> ./data/mounts/mycustom.cnf

This should create a file called mycustom.cnf in the ./data/mounts/ directory. It will also echo the above text into the file.

Step 3: The Compose

Create a file called docker-compose.yml and copy and paste the following piece of code.

Run the following command to bring up the containers

docker-compose up -d

You should see the following:

Docker Compose Output

Note:

This compose file includes an additional container called adminer to help connect and view contents of the database
The compose file forwards the default MySQL port (3306) to our own custom port (3308) because we have a lot of MySQL databases