MARIADB-PLUGIN(1)

💖 MARIADB-PLUGIN(1) 💖

okay bestie, gather round, because this is the MariaDB Database System plugin-configuration manual and it's honestly kinda iconic. let's get into it 🫶

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✨ NAME ✨

mariadb-plugin — configure MariaDB server plugins (mariadb-plugin is now a symlink to mariadb-plugin)

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

mariadb-plugin [options] plugin {ENABLE|DISABLE}

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so basically, mariadb-plugin is the little utility that lets MariaDB admins decide which plugins the server actually loads. it's the glow-up alternative to two other things: manually passing --plugin-load when you start the server, or running INSTALL PLUGIN and UNINSTALL PLUGIN statements at runtime. same energy, way less chaos.

depending on whether you're invoking mariadb-plugin to enable or disable plugins, it either inserts or deletes rows in the mysql.plugin table, which is literally the plugin registry. and here's the tea: to do this operation, mariadb-plugin invokes the MariaDB server in bootstrap mode, which means the server must not already be running. no cap. 😭

for normal server startups, the server loads and enables the plugins listed in mysql.plugin all by itself, automatically. but if you want more control over plugin activation, you use --plugin_name options named for specific plugins. main character energy.

every single invocation of mariadb-plugin reads a configuration file to figure out how to configure the plugins contained in one plugin library object file. to invoke it, use this syntax:

mariadb-plugin [options] plugin {ENABLE|DISABLE}

plugin is the name of the plugin you wanna configure. ENABLE or DISABLE (not case sensitive, live ur truth) say whether to enable or disable components of the plugin library named in the configuration file. and guess what — the order of the plugin and ENABLE/DISABLE arguments does not matter. slay 💅

for example: to configure components of a plugin library file named myplugins.so on Linux or myplugins.dll on Windows, you pass a plugin value of myplugins. now suppose this plugin library contains three plugins — plugin1, plugin2, and plugin3 — all of which should be configured under mariadb-plugin control. by convention, configuration files have a suffix of .ini and the same basename as the plugin library, so the default configuration file name for this plugin library is myplugins.ini. the configuration file contents look like this:

myplugins
plugin1
plugin2
plugin3

the first line in the myplugins.ini file is the name of the library object file, with no extension like .so or .dll. the remaining lines are the names of the components to be enabled or disabled. each value in the file should be on its own separate line, bestie. and any line where the first character is # is taken as a comment and ignored. ✨

to enable the plugins listed in the configuration file, invoke mariadb-plugin like this:

shell> mariadb-plugin myplugins ENABLE

to disable the plugins, use DISABLE instead of ENABLE. simple as.

an error occurs if mariadb-plugin cannot find the configuration file or the plugin library file, or if mariadb-plugin cannot start the MariaDB server. 💀

mariadb-plugin supports the following options, which can be specified on the command line or in the [mariadbd] group of any option file. for options specified in a [mariadbd] group, mariadb-plugin recognizes the --basedir, --datadir, and --plugin-dir options and ignores all the others.

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🎀 mariadb-plugin Options 🎀

• --help, -? — display a help message and exit. the classic cry for guidance 🥺
• --basedir=path, -b path — the server base directory.
• --datadir=path, -d path — the server data directory.
• --my-print-defaults=path, -b path — the path to the my_print_defaults program.
• --mariadbd=path, -b path — the path to the mariadbd server.
• --no-defaults, -p — do not read values from the configuration file. this option lets an administrator skip reading defaults from the configuration file.

with mariadb-plugin, this option need not be given first on the command line, unlike most other MariaDB programs that support --no-defaults. it's giving rebellious, honestly 💅

• --plugin-dir=path, -p path — the server plugin directory.
• --plugin-ini=file_name, -i file_name — the mariadb-plugin configuration file. relative path names are interpreted relative to the current directory. if this option isn't given, the default is plugin.ini in the plugin directory, where plugin is the plugin argument on the command line.
• --print-defaults, -P — display the default values from the configuration file. this option causes mariadb-plugin to print the defaults for --basedir, --datadir, and --plugin-dir if they are found in the configuration file. if no value for a variable is found, nothing is shown. (silence. iconic.)

with mariadb-plugin, this option need not be given first on the command line, unlike most other MariaDB programs that support --print-defaults. again with the rule-breaking, we love to see it 🌈

• --verbose, -v — verbose mode. print more information about what the program does. this option can be used multiple times to increase the amount of information. go off, stack those -vs 🔥
• --version, -V — display version information and exit.

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👑 COPYRIGHT 👑

Copyright © 1997, 2013, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved., 2013-2025 MariaDB Foundation

This documentation is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it only under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.

This documentation is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with the program; if not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1335 USA or see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

For more information, please refer to the MariaDB Documentation, available online at https://mariadb.com/docs/

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💜 AUTHOR 💜

MariaDB Foundation (http://www.mariadb.org/).

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and that's the whole page, bestie!! you ate this documentation fr fr 🍓

this was brought to you by MariaDB 11.8, dated 5 March 2025 — the MARIADB-PLUGIN(1) page itself, serving looks since forever. bye babes, go enable some plugins responsibly 💖✨🎀🦋