building boinc server without mysql

[Matias Salimbene]

Hello,

I'm doing some hacking with boinc server. I was asked to try to set it up so that it connects to a remote mysql instance. At the moment I'm playing with dependancies, trying to build a container that runs boinc server and apache.

I do find that at buildtime, boinc requires mysql server. I know what I'm trying to do is not at all supported and is at my own peril. But do you know any particular reason why it wouldn't work. In other words, am I 100% wasting my time, or it could be possible to do this?

Thanks!

[David P. Anderson]

The BOINC server can definitely run with a remote MySQL DB
(both the PHP web code and the scheduler).
Some projects work this way.
It's out of date now, but Marius Millea packaged the BOINC server
as 3 Docker containers: one with a MySQL server, one with Apache and
the web code,
one with the rest:
https://github.com/marius311/boinc-server-docker

So: I think the BOINC build system should require libmysqlclient-dev
but not mysql-server.
If you can figure out how to remove the latter dependency, please make a PR

-- David

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[Vitalii Koshura]

Just for the record, we have a fork of it with some of the broken dependencies fixed: https://github.com/BOINC/boinc-server-docker

At some moment we will update it to the latest release version.

So if you are looking to work with the Docker container, it's better to use this fork instead.

Best regards,

Vitalii Koshura

ср, 26 мар. 2025 г. в 20:31, 'David P. Anderson' via boinc_projects <boinc_p...@ssl.berkeley.edu>:

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[Oliver Behnke]

Hi Matias,

On 26.03.25 19:36, Matias Salimbene wrote:
> I was asked to try to set it up
> so that it connects to a remote mysql instance.

No problem, just enter that server's IP into you project's config.xml DB
settings.

> I do find that at buildtime, boinc requires mysql server.

Does it really require the whole server or just the client libraries?
The latter are of course always needed since you still want to connect
to a (remote) MySQL instance.

Maybe I'm missing what the actual problem is, though.

Best,
Oliver

[Matias Salimbene]

Thank you all! I was able to create a Docker container running the BOINC server and connect it to a remote MySQL instance. In the end, it came down to figuring out the right dependencies and configuring make_project for a new project or config.xml for an existing one.

While testing the addition and removal of dependencies to reduce the image size, I noticed that one library—libapache2-mod-php—significantly increases the final image from ~400MB to ~1.5GB. I plan to explore replacing it with smaller libraries in the future and just wanted to share that observation.

Thanks again, everyone, for the feedback!