Instead of using this hack you might want to use MariaDB 10.x which can work with both old and new apps.
An alternative could be to use the MySQL Docker image Show archive.org snapshot which is still updated for 5.6.
Ubuntu 16.04 only provides packages for MySQL 5.7 which has a range of backwards compatibility issues with code written against older MySQL versions.
Oracle maintains a list of official APT repositories for MySQL 5.6, but those repositories do not yet support Ubuntu 16.04. However, the 15.10 repos will work for 16.04.
I would not recommend to do this in production environment, but on a development machine, follow these steps:
-
Dump your databases, if you want to keep them. Keeping the data directory itself did not work for me.
-
Uninstall everything related to MySQL 5.7 with
apt remove mysql-client mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev mysql-common
Check if you removed everything using
dpkg -l | grep mysql
Purge remainders (e.g. marked with
rc
) withdpkg -P <package> [<package> ...]
. -
Download the
apt_config
-debian package from Oracle Show archive.org snapshot and install it usingdpkg -i mysql-apt-config_0.7.2-1_all.deb
Choose "MySQL 5.6" and "Ubuntu Wily" (assuming Xenial is not yet provided)
-
Run
apt-cache policy mysql-server
If this shows a 5.6 version, continue.
If not, check your
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/mysql.list
. It should look roughly like this:### THIS FILE IS AUTOMATICALLY CONFIGURED ### # You may comment out entries below, but any other modifications may be lost. # Use command 'dpkg-reconfigure mysql-apt-config' as root for modifications. deb http://repo.mysql.com/apt/ubuntu/ wily mysql-apt-config deb http://repo.mysql.com/apt/ubuntu/ wily mysql-5.6 deb http://repo.mysql.com/apt//ubuntu/ wily mysql-tools deb-src http://repo.mysql.com/apt/ubuntu/ wily mysql-5.6
You might have to replace "xenial" with "wily". Although you are using 16.04 (codename Xenial), Oracle currently seems to only provide 5.6 in the repos for 14.04 (codename Wiley). But those sources work for 16.04, too.
-
Create a file
/etc/apt/preferences.d/mysql
with this contentPackage: * Pin: origin "repo.mysql.com" Pin-Priority: 999
-
Run
apt update
-
Run
apt install mysql-client mysql-server libmysqlclient-dev
You should get 5.6 versions.
In case you have installed and MySQL ruby gems (like mysql2
), you will have to remove and reinstall them, since they have been linked to the old libraries. Note that gem pristine
will not help.