MySQL 5.7 Does Not Have an Official Docker Image on ARM/M1 Mac

Here is how you can run it anyways

Logos of MySQL™ and Apple™ M1 | created by author

If you try to run the official mysql:5.7, 5.6 or 5.5 images in a new Mac, you’ll get this message:

Oracle does not officially support the old MySQL 5.x versions on ARM. You can see that in their supported platforms overview:

Supported Platforms: MySQL Database

So what can we do?

Run MySQL 8

The newer MySQL 8 is supported on ARM, and the official docker image has support for it.

But, if your project wasn’t planning to move to the newer MySQL version anyways, you probably shouldn’t run MySQL 8 locally as a workaround.

Run MariaDB

The fork of MySQL is mostly compatible with its brother and can be used as a replacement. And it does officially support ARM64.

But here, you have to be aware that your local environment might not exactly be the same as the live environment.

The question I can’t answer is which version to choose for the best MySQL 5.7 support. I tried the latest 10 version (10.8), and it worked great for my use case.

Run MySQL 5.7 Unofficially

The source code of MySQL is open, and there isn’t anything stopping you from just compiling it for ARM64. Debian and Ubuntu have mysql-server-5.7 images for arm for years, even though they are somewhat more dated than the x86 variants.

There are also already premade images out there. I had great luck with the biarms/mysql:5.7 image. It has the same options and environment variables as the official docker image, so it can be a drop-in replacement.

GitHub — biarms/mysql: One more Docker MySQL project for ARM devices

You can even tag it locally, so it gets used instead of the official Docker Image.

# docker pull biarms/mysql:5.7
# docker tag biarms/mysql:5.7 mysql:5.7

Then, every project referencing the mysql:5.7 will automatically and unknowingly use the biarms image.

Run MySQL 5.7 Using Emulation

This should be a last resort because of performance, but if you need the same version somewhere else and performance does not matter at that moment, docker is perfectly able to emulate x86.

docker run --rm \
  --platform linux/amd64 \
  -e MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD=password \
  -p 3306:3306 \
  mysql:5.7

Note that this emulation is using QEMU inside the existing Linux VM. So it isn’t Rosetta 2 doing its translation thing. But it is surprisingly usable.

Run Docker on a Different Machine

This is cheating, but it is still an option, especially if you have multiple images that don’t have an x86 version. I have an entire guide on how to do that:

Seamless docker dev environment on a VPS

Conclusion

As you can see, you have many options to toy with. Especially the unofficial way is probably the way to go.

But the emulation way is interesting too. It means you can run everything in a pinch, even if it is suboptimal.