(Originally posted at Unquiet)

I had to reinstall Mysql because it wasn�t one of the things I backed up before erasing my hard drive. Since I�m now running Mac OS X 10.4 �Tiger�, I decided to set it up to start when the system boots, but the system for creating startup items has changed slightly. So I saved the following xml in /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.Mysql.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC 
         "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "
        http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
    <plist version="1.0">
    <dict>
        <key>Labelkey>
        com.mysql.Mysql</string>
        <key>OnDemandkey>
        />
        <key>ProgramArgumentskey>
        
                /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safestring>
        </array>
        <key>ServiceDescriptionkey>
        Mysql 4.1 Database Server</string>
        <key>UserNamekey>
        mysql</string>
        <key>WorkingDirectorykey>
        /usr/local/mysqlstring>
    </dict>
    plist>

Note that I'm using the official OSX distribution of MySQL... but with a few changes to match your database location, you can get this to work with other installs (fink, darwinports, etc).