MySQL/version/5.7

Recovering / Setting passwords

A lot of the instructions online for doing this no longer work with 5.7. The following is true for version 5.7.24-0ubuntu0.18.04.1

Obsolete instructions:

• Mysql (MariaDB 10.0.29): Set root password, but still can login without asking password?: the SQL command for changing passwords is different
  • SET PASSWORD is deprecated, but may work
  • ALTER USER is preferred.
  • BUT that won't work when grant tables are skipped; you have to use update user set authentication_string=PASSWORD("new_password") where User='root';
• Setting, Changing And Resetting MySQL Root Passwords
  • default value for --skip-grant-tables is now FALSE, so you have to specify --skip-grant-tables=TRUE

Also, you may need to create the /run/mysql folder and chown it to mysql:adm or whatever user is appropriate on your system. (You can determine what user:group MySQL is using on your system by looking at the log files, typically /var/log/mysql.