Unable to initialize data directory

MySQL & MariaDB Percona Server for MySQL 5.7
1

When MySQL 5.7 went GA, we tried to test the GA release and were unable to do so because we could not get it to create a data directory. I now have a request to install Percona Server 5.7 (on a Red Hat Linux 6.7 VM) and the same problem is occurring. Installing the packages creates /var/lib/mysql/, /var/lib/mysql-files/, and /var/lib/mysql-keyring/, all correctly owned by user mysql, but mysqld --initialize --user=mysql simply quits after doing absolutely nothing:

hostname:root:/usr:17 # /usr/sbin/mysqld --initialize --user=mysql -V
/usr/sbin/mysqld Ver 5.7.11-4 for Linux on x86_64 (Percona Server (GPL), Release 4, Revision 5c940e1)
hostname:root:/usr:18 # ls -Al /var/lib/mysql*
/var/lib/mysql:
total 0

/var/lib/mysql-files:
total 0

/var/lib/mysql-keyring:
total 0
hostname:root:/usr:19 #

What are we missing? Does anyone know what is the problem here? We have not accomplished a single successful MySQL 5.7 or Percona Server 5.7 installation, because mysql_install_db is gone since 5.7.6, telling us to use mysqld --initialize instead, and mysqld --initialize doesn’t do anything. We can’t even get it to tell us why it’s failing.

Update:
We were able to perform a clean install of 5.6.30 and then upgrade in place to 5.7.11 without incident. But I would dearly love to know why we cannot get a clean 5.7.11 install to work.

2

Remove the ‘-V’ at the end of the line, use this instead:

mysqld --initialize --user=mysql --datadir=/var/lib/mysql

or you can also use this if you want to use your existing my.cnf file:

mysqld --defaults-file --initialize --user=mysql
3

Thanks, we’ll give that a try. It’d be nice if Oracle’s documentation mentioned those additional options.