MySQL is a database management system that’s installed as part of LAMP/LEMP stacks. On Ubuntu, the MySQL server is managed by systemd. We’ll cover the necessary steps to stop and start it with systemctl in this article. We’ll also explain what you should do if the MySQL server doesn’t start. Check MySQL Server Status Assuming the MySQL server is already installed, you should first check its current status. sudo systemctl status mysql Start/Restart MySQL Server By default, the server status should be active (running). You can restart the server from this state with sudo systemctl restart mysql If the server is inactive (dead), you can start the server instead, although restarting will have the same end result as well. sudo systemctl start mysql Stop/Disable MySQL Server If you need to shut down the MySQL server, you can do so with sudo systemctl stop mysql The MySQL service is configured to start automatically at boot. This means the server will start again when you reboot your machine. If you want, you can change this behavior with sudo systemctl disable mysql And in case you want to revert it back to the default behavior in the future, you can set the server to startup at boot with sudo systemctl enable mysql Fixing MySQL Server Startup Issues Older Ubuntu versions used the mysqld unit to manage the MySQL server, but present versions use mysql. If you try to use mysqld out of habit, you’ll get the “failed to start mysqld.service: unit mysqld.service not found” error. Resolving this is super easy; simply use mysql instead as we’ve shown in the earlier sections. Another common scenario is that the startup fails stating that “the start request repeated too quickly”. This can be resolved by setting the correct permissions for the /var/lib/mysql/ and /var/log/mysql/ directories. sudo chown -R mysql:mysql /var/lib/mysql/ /var/log/mysql/ Aside from these two cases, you can take a couple of other steps to troubleshoot startup problems. First, review the configurations from the /etc/mysql directory. If you made any config changes before the startup issues started, try reverting them. Next, check the error log at /var/log/mysql/error.log. This should give you some insight into what’s causing the problem.