Local MySQL container using docker-compose

2 min readJul 30, 2020

You'll learn how to set up MySQL container for your local development using docker compose. You can easily start it and shut it down when you don't need it and your data won't get lost. Very useful when you just want to create a MySQL database quick for your local development.

Directory structure

./db
./db/sql/
./docker-compose.yml

Explanation

Our MySQL data will live inside ./db directory.

You can put any sql file into ./db/sql directory, it will run automatically when during build. (It's useful when you want to restore data from some dump file)

./docker-compose.yml is our docker compose configuration file.

Code

docker-compose.yml

version: '3'services:
  # MySQL
  db:
    image: mysql:5.7
    container_name: mysql_host
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: root
      MYSQL_DATABASE: test
      MYSQL_USER: docker
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: docker
      TZ: 'Asia/Tokyo'
    command: mysqld --character-set-server=utf8mb4 --collation-server=utf8mb4_unicode_ci
    volumes:
      - ./db/data:/var/lib/mysql
      - ./db/sql:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d
    ports:
      - 3306:3306

How to run

docker-compose up -d

How to stop

docker-compose down

Additional info

You will be able to connect to your database called test, on your localhost port 3306, with the user named docker using the password docker.

If you put any sql file inside ./db/sql/ folder, you will find that it got executed.

You will find your data is still available after you shut down and start your container again, since we specify volumes in our docker compose yaml file.