I’ve got a few projects rotating through the front burners, and one of them involves setting up a MariaDB instantiation on a USB key or drive or whatever you want to call it. And I want Python, at least for development. The nomenclature goes out the door when there’s more conflicted marketing than unconflicted engineering.

There’s some good stuff I found along the way that others might find useful. If you just want to get to the core of the solution, skip down to the ‘My Solution’ portion of this entry.

Stuff Found Along The Way.

I learned a few things along the way. For example, some people might be taken by this article on installing a web server on a USB key. Before you run off, you’ll might want to know about the Windows 10 Version of XAMPP available only on this German site (that I could find at the time of this writing).

A little rant here: Someone needs to do an AMP stack with Python. If I get bored enough and have enough time, maybe that will be something I fiddle with.

There is, of course, the ability to simply run a portable Linux install – I would historically go with Knoppix – but I opted out of doing that at this time because I just don’t want the overhead. No distro wars here, plenty of good distros here. In the end, when the time comes, I’ll research the new portable distros that have come out.

My Solution

It’s really simple. Just download MariaDB and drop the archive (zip, tar, whatever) onto your USB drive. Decompress it there. When you run it off the key, use the  “–no-defaults” option. If you’re running Windows, modify your shortcut with it.

“–no-defaults” keeps all paths relative. Bear that in mind if things get wonky. They haven’t for me, yet.

As far as Python,  WinPython is the answer for Windows. Runs right off the USB key. Read the documentation, someone wrote it for a reason.

Yeah, I know. Linux. Eventually, it will likely go that route, but for now it has to stay Windows 10 because of humans who use Windows 10.