Joomla! and MySQL 8.0.12

As other CMS using MySQL and PHP, Joomla! is not yet 100% ready to work with MySQL 8.0 out of the box.

I’ve been contacted by Brian Teeman to give my opinion and some tips… so here is the blog post 😉

@lefred If you could offer some advice on this #joomla #mysql 8 issue it would be appreciated https://t.co/FS37GVunEO

— ((( Brian Teeman ))) (@brianteeman) August 1, 2018

For Joomla!, I’ve tried the latest 4.0.0 Alpha 4 available for download. I’m also using PHP 7.0.31 and the new MySQL 8.0.12.

Database and User Creation

First let’s create a user (joomla/joomla) and a database. I won’t change the authentication method yet and let the default:

Joomla! Installation Wizard

And now we can start Joomla!’s installation wizard:

So far, all good, let’s jump the the database settings:

And when we click on “Install Joomla >“….

Expected problem… as of course PHP is not supporting the new default ‘caching_sha2_password‘ authentication method (check this previous post to know more about it).

So let’s change the authentication method for our user joomla:

Let’s try again…

KABOUM, again the same error…, we also need to change my.cnf to let know the server that the default authentication method is ‘mysql_native_password‘.

So in my.cnf, in the [mysqld] section we add:

default_authentication_plugin = mysql_native_password

And we restart mysqld.

Let’s try again to clik on “Install Joomla >“….

Wooohooo it works \o/

However this is not yet enough… as if you click on “Complete & Open Site“, we can see that there is a problem:

We should see more… we don’t see the complete site.

As explained in the Joomla! wiki page for MySQL 8, we need to run a specific query:

Now we can refresh our Joomla! page and…

Taaaadaaam ! It works ! Not that complicated after all 😀

Conclusion

So, in conclusion, to run Joomla! with MySQL 8.0 you need:

• to use mysql_native_password as authentication method as default in the server
• be sure your created user uses mysql_native_password as authentication method
• run one UPDATE query as described in the Joomla! wiki page.

You can easily verify the authentication method for a user running:

and the default authentication method like this:

That’s all for now and enjoy Joomla! with MySQL 8.0 !