I am currently running a Java Spring application using TestContainers to manage my datasources. I am having issues setting global variables for my MySQL instance on Docker during initialization of the docker instance.

I've tried a few things.

TestContainers has a method execInContainer which takes a string of commands.

container.execInContainer("mysqld", "--character_set_server=utf8");

In addition, you can also run an init script using .withInitScript("mysql_test_init.sql");

SET @@global.character_set_client = 'utf8';
SET @@global.character_set_server = 'utf8';

Using execInContainer seems to do nothing and does not change the variable(s) in MySQL.

Using the script fails due to Docker using a non-root user to make changes.

Access denied for user 'test'@'%' (using password: YES)

Is there a way I can easily change/configure the global variables of MySQL. Am I doing something wrong?

Some parameters I would like to change:

• character_set_client
• character_set_connection

Thank you.