Solved: MySQL fix for "Field ‘xxxx’ doesn’t have a default value"

June 22nd, 2015

Warning: This post is 9 years old. Some of this information may be out of date.

I've recently been working on a few of our older websites with newer MySQL installations and am coming across the following error:

    SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1364 Field 'delivery_address_id' doesn't have a default value

This is caused by MySQL having a strict mode set which won't allow INSERT or UPDATE commands with empty fields where the schema doesn't have a default value set.

There are a couple of fixes for this.

First 'fix' is to assign a default value to your schema. This can be done with a simple ALTER command:

    ALTER TABLE `details` CHANGE COLUMN `delivery_address_id` `delivery_address_id` INT(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT 0 ;

However, this may need doing for many tables in your database schema which will become tedious very quickly. The second fix is to assign a default sql_mode on the mysql server.

If you are using a brew installed MySQL you should edit the my.cnf file in the MySQL directory at /usr/local/Cellar/mysql/<version>/my.cnf. Comment out or change the sql_mode at the bottom:

    # For advice on how to change settings please see
    # http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.6/en/server-configuration-defaults.html
    
    [mysqld]
    
    # Remove leading # and set to the amount of RAM for the most important data
    # cache in MySQL. Start at 70% of total RAM for dedicated server, else 10%.
    # innodb_buffer_pool_size = 128M
    
    # Remove leading # to turn on a very important data integrity option: logging
    # changes to the binary log between backups.
    # log_bin
    
    
    
    # These are commonly set, remove the # and set as required.
    # basedir = .....
    # datadir = .....
    # port = .....
    # server_id = .....
    # socket = .....
    
    # Remove leading # to set options mainly useful for reporting servers.
    # The server defaults are faster for transactions and fast SELECTs.
    # Adjust sizes as needed, experiment to find the optimal values.
    # join_buffer_size = 128M
    # sort_buffer_size = 2M
    # read_rnd_buffer_size = 2M
    
    #sql_mode=NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION,STRICT_TRANS_TABLES
    sql_mode=""

Save the file and restart Mysql:

launchctl unload -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist
launchctl load -w ~/Library/LaunchAgents/homebrew.mxcl.mysql.plist    

NOTE: make sure you run the above as your usual user and not as root/sudo. I did this and MySQL refused to restart as I had caused it to break permissions somewhere.

Alternatively you can comment out the above line and add the sql_mode line to your system MySQL config at /etc/my.cnf:

[mysqld]
sql_mode = ""

Hope this helps someone out there!