Unknown table engine ‘InnoDB’

Unknown table engine ‘InnoDB’
December 23rd, 2007

I was getting the error “ERROR 1286 (42000): Unknown table engine ‘InnoDB’” when trying to create/alter tables with the InnoDB engine. You can check for this warning by issuing the create or alter statements and then running
show warnings;
in the same mysql client session.

Check if you have InnoDB support enabled:
mysql> show variables like ‘have_innodb’; +—————+———-+ | Variable_name | Value | +—————+———-+ | have_innodb | DISABLED | +—————+———-+

The problem is that InnoDB is not enabled by default in Debian distributions of my.cnf. To enable it, simply comment the following lines under the [mysqld] section.

#skip-innodb