LARAGON – Migrate to MariaDB

1. Introduction

By default Laragon, comes with MySQL installed. But migrating to MariaDB is not that difficult.

Use Laragons build-in Quick Add option to install MariaDB.

2. Notice

Be sure your Windows 10 (64 bit) OS has the latest Visual C++ Redistributable for Visual Studio 2015-2019 installed.

3. What about the data?

This procedure will install MariaDB into your Laragon installation.
A new folder \LARAGON\data\mariadb-x.x\ wil be created.
It will not touch the existing MySQL database.

This means you’ll have to :

  1. export all existing databases BEFORE adding MariaDB
  2. import all exported databases AFTER installing MariaDB

4. Laragon - Add MariaDB

  • Go to MariaDB Downloads and select the version you want to install. Look for the latest Stable release.
  • Under Package Type, choose ZIP file.
  • Click the Download button and save the file to your download folder.
  • The packed file is named for instance mariadb-10.6.5-winx64.zip.
  • Unpack the downloaded ZIP archive in a folder with the same name, for instance mariadb-10.6.5-winx64.
  • Move the complete \mariadb-10.6.5-winx64\ folder to the \bin\mysql\ folder of your Laragon installation.
  • In the Laragon Button Menu, stop all services by clicking the Stop All button.
  • In the MySQL section, select Version → mariadb-x.x.x-win64.
  • In the Laragon Button Menu, click on the Start All button. Grant access to the mysql.exe service.
  • Laragon has now created a new data folder \LARAGON\data\mariadb-x.x\

5. Inspecting the new database

In case you have not yet added phpMyAdmin to your Laragon installation, do so now by folowing the instructions in this post.

  • In the Laragon Button Menu, click on the Database button.
  • In a fresh Laragon installation, the default user is root  and the password is not set.
  • Select your preferred language and log in to phpMyAdmin.
  • phpMyAdmin may complain about the phpMyAdmin configuration storage not being completely configured.
  • Inside the warning, click on the link Find out why.

  • Inside de next notice, click on the link Create.

  • phpMyAdmin will then create and configure the database named phpmyadmin.

  • Click on the Home button. The warning should be gone now.

You have now installed MariaDB into your Laragon installation.

You can now start importing your databases.

After succesful import and testing, you can delete the obsolete mySQL folders in :

  • \LARAGON\bin\mysql\
  • \LARAGON\data\

6. Character Set and Collation

In some cases you might want to configure the MariaDB UTF 8 settings by specifying the character set and the collation.

In my case, the preferred character set is utf8mb4 and the collation is utf8mb4_unicode_ci.

If you want to force MariaDB to use this settings, you’ll have to add them to these 2 files :

  • \LARAGON\bin\mysql\mariadb-10.6.5-winx64\my.ini
  • \LARAGON\usr\tpl\MySQL.my.ini.tpl

In both files, add the settings to the [mysqld] section :

##UTF 8 Settings
character_set_server=utf8mb4
collation_server=utf8mb4_unicode_ci

4 Comments

    • Yes, You have to export all databases you want to reuse in MySQL.
      Then install MariaDB and import them in MariaDB.
      Peace of cake.

  1. Mariadb.org has changed. I have not found a way to copy zip file url anymore. Tried just changing version numbers to package config file but it doesn`t work anymore. So is there a way to install Mariadb someway with quick add or manually?

    • The mariaDB website has changed. Thanks for the hint.
      I adapted the post. It now explaines how to install (or update) mariaDB manually.

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