Accessing MariaDB without sudo on Ubuntu

Please note that all opinions are that of the author.

So I’m finally able to get back to trying Rails development on my Ubuntu box and the first real error I found was when I tried to create a database – I couldn’t get into MariaDB unless I used sudo – very, very odd. I found the solution on Ubuntu Forums:

sudo mysql -u root
use mysql;
update user set plugin='' where User='root';
flush privileges;
\q

Honestly I have no idea what this is. Sigh. Oh well it works and it is documented at least.