Charmed MySQL Tutorial > 4. Manage passwords

Manage passwords

When we accessed MySQL earlier in this tutorial, we needed to use a password manually. Passwords help to secure our database and are essential for security. Over time, it is a good practice to change the password frequently.

This section will go through setting and changing the password for the admin user.

Summary

• Retrieve the root password
• Rotate the root password
• Set the root password

Retrieve the root password

The root user’s password can be retrieved by running the get-password action on the Charmed MySQL application:

juju run mysql/leader get-password

Example output:

...
password: yWJjs2HccOmqFMshyRcwWnjF
username: root

Rotate the root password

You can change the root user’s password to a new random password by running:

juju run mysql/leader set-password

Example output:

Running operation 12 with 1 task
  - task 13 on unit-mysql-1

Waiting for task 13...
status: completed

The status: completed above means the password has been successfully updated. To be sure, call get-password once again to check that the root password is different from the previous password.

Set the root password

You can change the root password to a specific password by running:

juju run mysql/leader set-password password=my-password && \
juju run mysql/leader get-password

Example output:

Running operation 18 with 1 task
  - task 19 on unit-mysql-1

Waiting for task 19...
Running operation 20 with 1 task
  - task 21 on unit-mysql-1

Waiting for task 21...
password: my-password
username: root

The root password should match whatever you passed in when you entered the command.

Next step: 5. Integrate with another application