Question

I want to install a mysql workbench binary locally on my linux machine because I don’t have sudo rights. I did this when I installed python using –prefix. Can this also be done with mysql workbench?

Answer 1

Yes, you can, provided that you are willing to compile Workbench from sources. You are advised however that you’ll need sudo rights to install its compilation dependencies. Here are the steps:

1. Download Workbench’s sources from the official download site. You should download the version tagged “Generic Linux (Architecture Independent), Compressed TAR Archive”.

2. Uncompress the downloaded source file. From the linux terminal:

   $ tar -zxvf mysql-workbench-whatever.tar.gz

3. Move to the directory with Workbench’s source code:

   cd mysql-workbench-whatever

4. Read the INSTALL file located in this directory to find out the required packages that you would need to install in order to compile Workbench. For Ubuntu here’s the command to install them:

   $ sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf automake libtool libzip-dev libxml2-dev libsigc++-2.0-dev libglade2-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev libglu1-mesa-dev libgl1-mesa-glx mesa-common-dev libmysqlclient15-dev uuid-dev liblua5.1-dev libpixman-1-dev libpcre3-dev libgnome2-dev libgtk2.0-dev libpango1.0-dev libcairo2-dev python-dev libboost-dev

5. Run autogen.sh with the path to where you want Workbench installed:

   $ ./autogen.sh --prefix=~/bin/wb52

   (The above command will get your Workbench’s binaries in the directory bin/wb52 within your home directory once compiled). Just change the destination dir to whatever you like.

6. Compile and install MySQL Workbench:

   $ make install

   This will take some time (maybe half an hour depending on your system). If you have more than one CPU core available you should use, for instance:

   $ make -j3 install

   and this will use three cores for compilation (adjust the number of cores to whatever you find reasonable for your system).

7. Once compiled you can run Workbench’s executable that will be located inside a bin directory within the path you set in step 5.

Have a lot of fun!