Installing MySQL community server on windows using a zip file in 5 steps

Here are the steps to install MySQL community server on a windows machine.

1. Download the MySQL Community server zip file from https://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/
2. Extract the file into a folder C:/mysql
3. Now goto C:/mysql/bin and run ‘mysqld — initialize’, this will create a folder C:/mysql/data and initialize MySQL with necessary files
4. Default Mysql 8 server now comes with a separate authentication mechanism that caused problems for me while connecting from spring boot so I create a file change_pwd.txt at C:/mysql/change_pwd.txt and content of the file is

ALTER USER ‘root’@’localhost’ IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY ‘root’;

5. Now run the mysqld process from C:/mysql/bin as

‘mysqld — init-file=C:/apps/mysql-8.0.26-winx64/change_pwd.txt’

This will start your msql server and you can now connect to it using the ‘mysql’ client command.