This section discusses how Instance Manager starts server instances when it starts. However, before you start Instance Manager, you should set up a password file for it. Otherwise, you will not be able to connect to Instance Manager to control it after it starts. For details about creating Instance Manager accounts, see Section 4.6.10.4, “Instance Manager User and Password Management”.

On Unix, the mysqld MySQL database server normally is started with the mysql.server script, which usually resides in the /etc/init.d/ directory. In MySQL 5.0.3, this script invokes mysqlmanager (the MySQL Instance Manager binary) to start MySQL. (In prior versions of MySQL the mysqld_safe script is used for this purpose.) Starting from MySQL 5.0.4, the behavior of the startup script was changed again to incorporate both setup schemes. In version 5.0.4, the startup script uses the old scheme (invoking mysqld_safe) by default, but one can set the use_mysqld_safe variable in the script to 0 (zero) to use the MySQL Instance Manager to start a server.

Starting with MySQL 5.0.19, you can use Instance Manager if you modify the my.cnf configuration file by adding use-manager to the [mysql.server] section:

[mysql.server]
use-manager

When Instance Manager starts, it reads its configuration file if it exists to find server instance sections and prepare a list of instances. Instance sections have names of the form [mysqld] or [mysqldN], where N is an unsigned integer (for example, [mysqld1], [mysqld2], and so forth).

After preparing the list of instances, Instance Manager starts the guarded instances in the list. If there are no instances, Instance Manager creates an instance named mysqld and attempts to start it with default (compiled-in) configuration values. This means that the Instance Manager cannot find the mysqld program if it is not installed in the default location. (Section 2.7, “Installation Layouts”, describes default locations for components of MySQL distributions.) If you have installed the MySQL server in a nonstandard location, you should create the Instance Manager configuration file.

Instance Manager also stops all guarded server instances when it shuts down.

The allowable options for [mysqldN] server instance sections are described in Section 4.6.10.2, “MySQL Instance Manager Configuration Files”. In these sections, you can use a special mysqld-path=path-to-mysqld-binary option that is recognized only by Instance Manager. Use this option to let Instance Manager know where the mysqld binary resides. If there are multiple instances, it may also be necessary to set other options such as datadir and port, to ensure that each instance has a different data directory and TCP/IP port number. Section 5.6, “Running Multiple MySQL Servers on the Same Machine”, discusses the configuration values that must differ for each instance when you run multiple instance on the same machine.

The typical Unix startup/shutdown cycle for a MySQL server with the MySQL Instance Manager enabled is as follows: