Download mysql code into a file

To export or import with MySQL, begin by logging into your server, preferably with (root) access.

Exporting from MySQL

The best tool for exporting a MySQL database to a text file is .

To use , you will need to know the login credentials of an appropriate that has the necessary privileges to export the database in question.

With that information in hand, enter the command with the appropriate flags and options:

The options in use are:

• The flag indicates that the MySQL will follow.
• The flag indicates we should be prompted for the associated with the above .
• is of course the exact name of the database to export.
• The symbol is a Unix directive for , which allows Unix commands to output the text results of the issued command to another location. In this case, that output location is a file path, specified by .

Note: It is generally advisable to input the fully qualified path and filename for the , so the resulting file is generated exactly where you want it.

For example, to export the database as the user to the directory, we might use the following command:

After entering our password when prompted above, this command then creates our backup file with a suffix (which is completely optional but advisable) in the appropriate directory.

By default, will not save commands which attempt to modify the existence of the actual database. Instead, by default, only actual (and their respective data) are saved and thus will be prepared for later import using this file. If you need the ability to export (and later recreate) one more more databases, read up on the flag in the official documentation.

Importing Into MySQL

Now that you’ve learned how to export a backup of a MySQL database, we’ll explore how to reverse the process and import the backup into an existing database.

As you might imagine, to compliment the command used for exporting, there is a similar command for importing.

In most cases, importing is just a matter of passing virtually identical options to the command. To import our saved file created earlier, we’d use many of the same flags and much the same syntax.

As before, the and flags are required for authentication, which is then followed by the name of the to import into (in this case, we’re using different, production database), then lastly specifying the fully-qualified path to the SQL dump file that contains our import data, . It’s also worth noting that doesn’t require the or (STDIN/STDOUT) symbols that were used with .

With that, you’ve learned how to both export/backup an existing database, and how to then import/restore that data into the same or even a different database.