An unfortunate limitation of using centos7 is that centos7 epel repos are limited to mariadb 5.5. Fortunately, mariadb.com has an upgrade tutorial [1] that I was finally able to get to work with a few additional steps. The upgrade procedure is as follows:
sudo systemctl stop mariadb sudo yum install wget wget https://downloads.mariadb.com/MariaDB/mariadb_repo_setup chmod +x mariadb_repo_setup sudo ./mariadb_repo_setup sudo yum update sudo systemctl start mariadb sudo mysql_upgrade
Finally, visit Special:Version and confirm that mariadb is now 10.6.x
If mariadb won't start, then you might need to do the following:
sudo tail -n 50 /var/log/mariadb/mariadb.log
to see what the issues are and then maybe:
sudo mkdir /var/lib/mysql sudo chown -R mysql:root /var/lib/mysql sudo mkdir /var/run/mariadb sudo chown -R mysql:root /var/run/mariadb
as needed.
[1] https://mariadb.com/resources/blog/installing-mariadb-10-on-centos-7-rhel-7/