Installing MySQL 5.0.85 on Mac OS X 10.6.6 Snow LeopardEdit

As I am using this for doing Rails development which on the remote server is running MySQL 5.0 I decided to install the same version on my local machine, building from source seeing as there is no binary installer for version 5.0 and Snow Leopard.

$ curl -O http://mysql.he.net/Downloads/MySQL-5.0/mysql-5.0.92.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf mysql-5.0.92.tar.gz
$ cd mysql-5.0.92
$ ./configure
$ make
$ make test # bails due to a failure, hopefully not too serious
$ sudo make install
$ sudo mysql_install_db --user=mysql

Note that as I am doing this development within a specific Rails application (with the development database running locally and stored inside the application’s tmp directory, and the test database in a throwaway ramdisk) I don’t really need to do any of the usual setup. In fact, even the mysql_install_db above is probably unnecessary. For an example of an installation where I do do the additional set-up see also: