Another simple task that’s often hard for beginners is importing and exporting MySQL dump. Here is quick rundown on how to do it.

To export data you need to use mysqldump:

mysqldump -u db_user -p db_name > dump_name.sql

Options given to mysqldump are:

  • -u db_user – connect as user db_user to database
  • -p – use password, it will ask you to enter your password
  • db_name is the name of MySQL database you want to dump
  • > dump_name.sql – by default mysqldump will print out the dump to terminal, but simple output redirect with > will instead write it to given filename, in this case dump_name.sql

Now that you have dump_name.sql file with all SQL queries needed to replicate your database you can import it using general-purpose mysql client:

mysql -u db_user -p db_name < dump_name.sql

User, password, and database name options are the same as for mysqldump. Since mysql reads input from terminal this time we can use < to read input from given file instead.

As always for more information you can consult manual using man mysqldump and man mysql.

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