Some time ago, I was building a new MySQL DB server (5.7.25) and like all DBAs, I have a template of my.cnf that I use for the new instances after changing a few variables based on the instance resources, replication … etc. I had MySQL installed but I struggled on having the service started!

MySQL failed to start, no errors were printed at all in the MySQL error log – or the log was not created from the first place 🙂 – even no errors in the system log and I had no clue what was going on!

After some digging in, I found the bad guy! The variable secure_file_priv referred to a directory that didn’t exist. When I had the directory created, everything was fine and the service started.

I tried to repeat the same scenario in MySQL 8 and it was much better. The error log indicated the root cause of the issue as below:
2019-03-25T23:39:59.810992Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-010095] [Server] Failed to access directory for --secure-file-priv. Please make sure that directory exists and is accessible by MySQL Server. Supplied value : /tmp/mysql
2019-03-25T23:39:59.811178Z 0 [ERROR] [MY-010119] [Server] Aborting

I’ve created a bug report (Bug #96406) and will update this post when it got fixed.

Conclusion

When you use my.cnf templates, make sure that all paths refer to directories that do exist on the system!