Switch to UTF-8 charset in Mysql on Ubuntu

When installing Mysql on Ubuntu the default character set is probably latin-1. Since Ubuntu uses UTF-8 for most other things this may be little strange. But it is easy to change.

The Mysql configuration file /etc/mysql/my.cnf has a magic line:

!includedir /etc/mysql/conf.d/

This will make it include settings on the subdirectory conf.d. It's not recommended to change the my.cnf file directly since it will cause problems when upgrading Ubuntu/Mysql to a new version.

Create a new file: /etc/mysql/conf.d/utf8_charset.cnf with the following contents:

[mysqld]
default-character-set=utf8

[client]
default-character-set=utf8

Restart mysql and you will have UTF-8 as character set:

$ mysql -u root -p -e "show variables like '%character%'"
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value                      |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+
| character_set_client     | utf8                       |
| character_set_connection | utf8                       |
| character_set_database   | utf8                       |
| character_set_filesystem | binary                     |
| character_set_results    | utf8                       |
| character_set_server     | utf8                       |
| character_set_system     | utf8                       |
| character_sets_dir       | /usr/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------+ 

Update 2012-11-12: This is valid for Mysql 5.1. For Mysql 5.5 see comment below by Martijn.