Best practices for temporarily enabling and disabling a MySQL user account?
data-migration, mysql, user-permissions
Solution
After experimenting with various methods, I went with setting the user's host field to something meaningless, then back to a valid value to re-enable the account when desired. This method is easily done through an admin tool or the mysql command prompt from an account with appropriate privileges, and doesn't require saving the password hash for later restore.
Problem
I have a MySQL user account that is used (only) as part of the deployment process to make changes to the database (add/drop tables and columns, etc). Because this user account has these high privileges, I want to keep it disabled most of the time, and only enable it when we are actually doing a deployment that involves database changes. What would be the best way to do this? Something in a couple stored procedures (proc_enable, proc_disable or similar) would be perfectly fine but I couldn't seem to find any best practices around this and MySQL doesn't seem to have an easy enable/disable toggle.