Initialize and configure the database

Database-backed sessions are scalable, persistent, and can be made high-concurrency and highly-available.

However, database-backed sessions are one of the slower session storages and incur a high overhead under heavy usage. Proper configuration of your database deployment can also be a substantial undertaking and is far beyond the scope of this documentation.

Start the mysql command-line client:
```
$ mysql -u root -p
```
Enter the MySQL root user's password when prompted.
To configure the MySQL database, create the dash database:
```
mysql> CREATE DATABASE dash;
```
Create a MySQL user for the newly-created dash database that has full control of the database. Replace DASH_DBPASS with a password for the new user:
```
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON dash.* TO 'dash'@'%' IDENTIFIED BY 'DASH_DBPASS';
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON dash.* TO 'dash'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'DASH_DBPASS';
```
Enter quit at the mysql> prompt to exit MySQL.

In the local_settings file (on Fedora/RHEL/CentOS: /etc/openstack-dashboard/local_settings, on Ubuntu/Debian: /etc/openstack-dashboard/local_settings.py and on openSUSE: /srv/www/openstack-dashboard/openstack_dashboard/local/local_settings.py), change these options:

SESSION_ENGINE = 'django.core.cache.backends.db.DatabaseCache'
DATABASES = {
    'default': {
        # Database configuration here
        'ENGINE': 'django.db.backends.mysql',
        'NAME': 'dash',
        'USER': 'dash',
        'PASSWORD': 'DASH_DBPASS',
        'HOST': 'localhost',
        'default-character-set': 'utf8'
    }
}

After configuring the local_settings as shown, you can run the manage.py syncdb command to populate this newly-created database.
```
$ /usr/share/openstack-dashboard/manage.py syncdb
```
Note on openSUSE the path is /srv/www/openstack-dashboard/manage.py.
As a result, the following output is returned:
```
Installing custom SQL ...
Installing indexes ...
DEBUG:django.db.backends:(0.008) CREATE INDEX `django_session_c25c2c28` ON `django_session` (`expire_date`);; args=()
No fixtures found.
```
On Ubuntu: If you want to avoid a warning when you restart apache2, create a blackhole directory in the dashboard directory, as follows:
```
# mkdir -p /var/lib/dash/.blackhole
```
Restart Apache to pick up the default site and symbolic link settings:
On Ubuntu:
```
# /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
```
On Fedora/RHEL/CentOS:
```
# service httpd restart
```
```
# service apache2 restart
```
On openSUSE:
```
# systemctl restart apache2.service
```
On Ubuntu, restart the nova-api service to ensure that the API server can connect to the dashboard without error:
```
# service nova-api restart
```

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