Plesk: Upgrade MariaDB From Version 5.50 to 10.2 on CentOS 7

This article was written for Plesk 12.5 and Plesk Onyx 17.x. In these versions, Plesk ships with MariaDB v5.50. The disadvantage of this MariaDB version is that the FULLTEXT index is not allowed in an InnoDB database. This works only with v10 and up. So today, I will show you a quick way to upgrade MariaDB on Plesk to the latest stable version.

Requirements

• Plesk 12.5 or Plesk Onyx 17.x already installed.
• You need SSH root access.

Make sure you’ve made a full backup/snapshot of your server before starting this tutorial.

Performing the upgrade

If WatchDog is enabled on Plesk, please deactivate it before proceeding!

Login via SSH as root to your server.

To install MariaDB 10.2, we need to add the MariaDB repository that hosts version 10 of MariaDB. This can be done with the following code generator individually for your server. Please visit: downloads.mariadb.org and select the distro, release and version that you want to install. In our case, it will look like this:

Copy your custom repository and paste it using vim into a file under /etc/yum.repos.d/. I recommend naming the file MariaDB.repo to remain consistent with the other repository files.

Stop the MariaDB server. Please keep in mind that everything depending on MariaDB will stop functioning until you complete the upgrade.

systemctl stop mariadb

If it exists, remove the old MariaDB benchmark tool.

yum remove mariadb-bench

Start a server update.

yum update

Refresh symlinks.

systemctl enable mariadb

Perform the upgrade.

mysql_upgrade -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow`

Restart your server. The upgrade is complete!

Now, login back into your MySQL shell:

mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow`

… then type status to check your installed version. You will see output similar to the following text.

If you had WatchDog disabled for this upgrade operation, now is the time to re-enable it.