v2.0.0-rc8-no-public installation DB error

tommyt1

The issue

Hello, I'm encountering an error during installation. Has anyone encounter this?

Flarum information

v2.0.0-rc8-no-public

Environment:
12.1.2-MariaDB Apache/2.4.66 (Win64) OpenSSL/3.6.0 PHP/8.5.2
Error on UI:

Something went wrong: SQLSTATE[08S01]: Communication link failure: 1184 Aborted connection 162 to db: 'dev_flarum' user: 'dev' host: 'localhost' (init_connect command failed)

Error in DB log:

2026-10-01 11:03:04 162 [Warning] You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MariaDB server version for the right syntax to use near ''SET NAMES utf8'' at line 1

I searched 'SET NAMES utf8' in code base but none found.

tommyt1

From my research so far, seems to be mismatch in connection settings of
charset=utf8
vs
charset=utf8mb4

How do I set the 'charset' connection options during the setup process?

TIA.

Karl

That is not coming from Flarum. The clue is init_connect command failed: init_connect is a MariaDB server variable holding a statement the server runs on every new connection, and yours is over-quoted, so the server tries to execute the literal string 'SET NAMES utf8' and hits exactly the syntax error in your log. That failed statement aborts the connection, which is your 1184 Aborted connection and then the 08S01 the installer reports.

That is also why you could not find SET NAMES in the codebase. It is not there. Look in your my.ini for a line like init_connect="'SET NAMES utf8'" and either remove it or write it as init_connect="SET NAMES utf8mb4".

It is not a charset mismatch. Flarum hardcodes utf8mb4 and utf8mb4_unicode_ci for both mysql and mariadb in src/Install/DatabaseConfig.php, and the utf8 you may have spotted in that file is the PostgreSQL branch. Forcing utf8 through init_connect would fight that and give you encoding trouble later even once the install succeeds.

Quickest way to confirm before you change anything: connect with any other client as that same user. It will fail the same way, because init_connect runs for every non-SUPER connection.

tommyt1

Karl Thank you for the feedback. I've removed the init_connect from my.ini and restarted both MariaDB and Apache HTTP but issue still persists. Also, the phpmyadmin has been and is still working in the same environment for more than 9 months.

My quick code and test setup more than 10 days ago is also working fine.

Karl

tommyt1 I reproduced this on MariaDB 12.1.2, the same version you are running, with an unprivileged dev user. Setting init_connect to an over-quoted value produces your error exactly, SQLSTATE[08S01]: Communication link failure: 1184 Aborted connection ... (init_connect command failed), and the server log line is identical to yours, You have an error in your SQL syntax ... near ''SET NAMES utf8'' at line 1. Clearing the variable makes the same connection succeed immediately.

In that same test root connected normally while dev was being rejected, because init_connect is skipped for privileged accounts. That is why phpMyAdmin has worked for nine months: it is almost certainly connecting as root, so it never runs the statement at all. Its working tells you nothing about whether dev can connect.

So the value is still set. Run SELECT @@global.init_connect; and you can settle it in one query. If it returns anything, the file you edited is not the one the server actually reads, and the service may well be started with an explicit --defaults-file that overrides every default location. You do not need to find that file to get moving: SET GLOBAL init_connect = ''; clears it right now, with no restart, and you can run the installer straight after.

If you do want to keep an init_connect, make it SET NAMES utf8mb4. I tested the correctly quoted SET NAMES utf8 too, and it connects but leaves the session on utf8mb3, which works against the utf8mb4 Flarum uses.