Mariadb in docker fails to start, keeps restarting

Lately I’ve seen errors in my local development environments:

mariadbd failed while attempting to check config
mkv2-db      | 	command was: mariadbd --verbose --help --log-bin-index=/tmp/tmp.ty9vQzLxEx
mkv2-db      | 	Can't initialize timers

This causes my database container to get stuck in a restarting loop.

The fix? Downgrade the mariadb version!

The database part of docker compose was configured like this:

services:
  db:
    container_name: ${NAME}-db
    image: mariadb
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ${MYSQL_PASSWORD}
      MYSQL_DATABASE: ${DB_NAME}
      MYSQL_USER: ${DB_USER}
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: ${DB_PASSWORD}
    volumes:
      - "./app/data/db:/var/lib/mysql"
    expose:
      - "3306"
    restart: unless-stopped

The version used on my system is mariadb 10.8.3, apparently that version can cause issues like this. After setting the image to mariadb:10.8.2 instead of mariadb, the issue was resolved!

services:
  db:
    container_name: ${NAME}-db
    image: mariadb:10.8.2
    environment:
      MYSQL_ROOT_PASSWORD: ${MYSQL_PASSWORD}
      MYSQL_DATABASE: ${DB_NAME}
      MYSQL_USER: ${DB_USER}
      MYSQL_PASSWORD: ${DB_PASSWORD}
    volumes:
      - "./app/data/db:/var/lib/mysql"
    expose:
      - "3306"
    restart: unless-stopped

Hope that helps you as well,

Happy developing!