I want to create two users on my MySQL test database, One with read-only access to tables relevant to generating reports, etc, the other with read-write access to the same tables. This is for testing a subsystem that normally connects with a read-only user but switches to a read-write user for certain tasks. I've created the read-write user with the correct privileges, and now I need a read-only version of the same user.
I'd rather not create the read-only version from scratch as I had to set a lot of privileges, which was rather laborious. Is there a way I can create a new user based on an existing user and then remove the INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE privilages from the new user? Something like CREATE USER 'user2' LIKE 'user1' or similar? I couldn't find it in the MySQL docs if it is possible to do this.
Answer
How about inserting into another table, update columns? Something like:
CREATE TABLE user_tmp LIKE user;
INSERT INTO user_tmp SELECT * FROM user WHERE host ='localhost' AND USER ='root';
UPDATE user_tmp SET user = 'readonlyuser', Insert_priv = 'N', Update_priv = 'N',
Delete_priv = 'N', /* TODO: ADAPT TO YOUR SUITS */ LIMIT 1;
INSERT INTO user select * FROM user_tmp;
DROP TABLE user_tmp;