Building an application with MariaDB Connector/C

Configuration tools

• mariadb_config: Configuration settings utility
• pkg-config: Determine configuration settings with pkg-config

Include files

How to find MariaDB include files

Windows

For Microsoft Windows Platforms MariaDB Connector/C doesn't provide configuration tools, in the default installation the files will be always installed at the same location.

The windows default installation (using MariaDB Connector/C MSI package) installs the include files in folder \ProgramFiles\MariaDB\MariaDB Connector/C 64-bit\include (or for 32-bit installation in \ProgramFiles\MariaDB\MariaDB Connector/C 32-bit\include.

Posix

On Posix platforms you can either use the mariadb_config utility which is located in the binary folder of your MariaDB Connector/C installation, or you can use the pkg-config command of your distribution, e.g.

$> mariadb_config --include
-I/usr/local/include/mariadb

$> pkg-config  libmariadb --cflags
-I/usr/local/include/mariadb

If you're using a different compiler than gcc or clang, you might need to adjust the include option for the compiler.

General includes

For using MariaDB Connector/C from your application, only the include file mysql.h is required.

Error handling

If you don't want to deal with numbers but also with the error code definitions, you need to include errmsg.h for client errors and mysqld_error.h for server errors. The latter one might not contain the latest server error codes, e.g. if you're using MySQL Connector/C from 10.2 server package it will not contain 10.3 or 10.4 error codes. It will also not contain all error codes from MySQL Server.

MariaDB extensions

Some special and not widely used extensions like the asynchronous API have their own include files which are not automatically included by mysql.h.

Extension	required include files
Dynamic column API	mariadb_dyncol.h
Asynchronous/non-blocking API	mariadb_async.h
Replication/Binlog API	mariadb_rpl.h

Client plugins

If you want to develop a client plugin (e.g. for authentication or connection handling) the plugin code must include mysql/client_plugin.h.

Linking your application against MariaDB Connector/C

Windows

For static linking the library libmariadb.lib is required, for dynamic linking use libmariadb.dll. Using the MSI installer, these libraries can be found in the lib directory of your MariaDB Connector/C installation.

Unless you use the experimental plugin remote_io (which requires the curl library) there are no dependencies to other libraries than the Windows system libraries.

Posix

To detect library path and the required libraries, use mariadb_config or pkg_config command:

$ mariadb_config --libs
-L/usr/local/lib/mariadb/ -lmariadb -ldl -lm -lpthread -lssl -lcrypto
$ pkg-config libmariadb --libs
-L/usr/local/lib/mariadb/ -lmariadb -ldl -lm -lpthread -lssl -lcrypto

Both programs will return the location of the MariaDB Connector/C library (-L), the library name (-lmariadb) and the depending libraries.

To use the static library, extract the library path from mariadb_config output or specify the option --libs-only-L when running the pkg-config command and append libmariadbclient.a to the path.

Example using gcc: gcc -o my_test my_test.o -L/usr/local/lib/mariadb/libmariadbclient.a

Depending on the configuration, you might need to also link against the libraries returned by --libs option.