This guide will take you through installing SingleStore on your Apple Silicon machine for development purposes. SingleStore are working on building official support for development-only workloads, meaning that this solution involving UTM/QEMU is not officially tested or supported by SingleStore.

SingleStore is a modern-day database solution built for rapid aggregation within your data-intensive applications. It is much faster at fetching and aggregating data than traditional MySQL-based solutions. It has personally been a crucial part of my gaming-focused analytics platform, so let me give some background to who I am and why I wrote this guide.

I'm Charlie Joseph and I run a Minecraft server analytics platform called Analyse. I built Analyse as I have ran and managed various gaming communities, and felt frustrated with how clunky and memory heavy other solutions were so I built my own. Analytics are a fundamental part of understanding your gaming servers growth, and building Analyse meant I knew I'd be dealing with high volumes of data from launch. SingleStore has been a fantastic solution to quickly aggregate data, which lead me to want to host it locally so I can experiment further with it.

For this guide we will be creating a Debian-based virtual machine which will host our SingleStore database, for this you'll need to download the Debian ISO alongside UTM to run our virtual machine with Apple Silicon.

Once you've downloaded these files, drag the UTM application into your Macs applications folder and then open the application.

With the UTM application open, press the + symbol found at the top of the application to create a new machine. Then..

Now we've got our virtual machine created and the settings page open, we will configure networking so our machine will have internet access. So..

With our machine created and our networking configured, it is finally time to begin booting it so that we can install our virtual machine. So..

Once the menu has loaded you'll be greeted with a Debian 11 banner at the top. Once you see this..

Once the installation is complete you'll see the "Configure the package manager" screen, once you're here..

With installation complete we can now eject the media like so..

To make set-up easier alongside allowing us to access our SingleStore instance locally from our Mac, we will configure the ports from our machine. To do this..

With our machine installed and configured we can finally begin installing SingleStore. Press the start button beside the machine option. Then..

Now we're logged in, we need to configure SSH so we can paste from our Mac to our machine. To do this, you'll need to type the following commands into the terminal:

Now that we've enabled SSH, open your Macs terminal (you can use CMD + SPACE and then typing "Terminal" to do this). Then..

Now that we're logged in, let's begin:

With SingleStore added, we can finally create our new cluster. To do this, head to your SingleStore Portal and sign in. Then..

Now our cluster has been created, we need to ensure it starts on boot alongside starting our cluster now. Which can be done like so..

With our cluster configured and started up, head to your browser and go to http://localhost:8080 (or another port if configured earlier). Once here, we'll need to..

Now you can login to your cluster for the online portal, and connect to your database locally using port 3306.

This was a long blog post, if it helped you out, be sure to tweet at me @heychazza.

Software Engineer Launched & sold my first successful business. Building analyse.net (@analyse) in public, full-time. My goal to hit $5,000 MRR.

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