How do I run the mysql command from the command line of an AWS RDS instance that is separate from the EC2 instance I am on?

Question

We have AWS Amazon Linux EC2 instances that connect to separate AWS RDS instances running MySQL.

We want to run the mysql command on the RDS instances to process a number of large SQL files that contain thousands of SQL statements. However, we need to be able to run these commands from a PHP application installed on the EC2 instances.

Is this possible and how can it be done?
For testing, we installed MySQL on the same machine as the PHP application, and were able to successfully run the mysql command to query both the localhost MySQL instance as well as the remote MySQL instances on the AWS RDS instances.

However, we're not sure how to do this when MySQL isn't installed and the mysql command isn't available on the EC2 instances.

We have explored using the ssh command in combination with the mysql command, but nothing seems to work yet.
Any advice is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Answer 1

Even though RDS hosts the mysql database you still need the appropriate packages to talk to the database such as php-mysql . In addition, the mysql package is just the client where mysql-server would actually install the server service which you don't need when using RDS. You can safely install mysql and php-mysql and likely achieve what you are looking for.

Answer 2

For testing, you can install MySQL workbench on the local machine(not on EC2 instance) and configure it to connect to RDS.

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/connect-rds-mysql-workbench/

Or, you can also connect to RDS from the command line using command

mysql -h mysql–instance1.123456789012.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com --ssl-ca=rds-ca-2015-root.pem -p

For detail explanation of above command visit :- https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonRDS/latest/UserGuide/USER_ConnectToInstance.html