Install sqlcmd and bcp the SQL Server command-line tools on Linux

10/02/2017
5 minutes to read
Contributors

THIS TOPIC APPLIES TO: yes

SQL Server (Linux only)

Azure SQL Database

Azure SQL Data Warehouse

Parallel Data Warehouse

The following steps install the command-line tools, Microsoft ODBC drivers, and their dependencies. The mssql-tools package contains:

sqlcmd: Command-line query utility.
bcp: Bulk import-export utility.

Install the tools for your platform:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Ubuntu
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
macOS
Docker

This topic describes how to install the command-line tools. If you are looking for examples of how to use sqlcmd or bcp, see the links at the end of this topic.

Install tools on RHEL 7

Use the following steps to install the mssql-tools on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Enter superuser mode.
```
sudo su
```

Download the Microsoft Red Hat repository configuration file.

curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/rhel/7/prod.repo > /etc/yum.repos.d/msprod.repo

Exit superuser mode.
```
exit
```
If you had a previous version of mssql-tools installed, remove any older unixODBC packages.
```
sudo yum remove unixODBC-utf16 unixODBC-utf16-devel
```
Run the following commands to install mssql-tools with the unixODBC developer package.
```
sudo yum install mssql-tools unixODBC-devel
```
Note
To update to the latest version of mssql-tools run the following commands:
```
sudo yum check-update
sudo yum update mssql-tools
```
Optional: Add /opt/mssql-tools/bin/ to your PATH environment variable in a bash shell.

To make sqlcmd/bcp accessible from the bash shell for login sessions, modify your PATH in the ~/.bash_profile file with the following command:
```
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bash_profile
```
To make sqlcmd/bcp accessible from the bash shell for interactive/non-login sessions, modify the PATH in the ~/.bashrc file with the following command:
```
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
```

Install tools on Ubuntu 16.04

Use the following steps to install the mssql-tools on Ubuntu.

Import the public repository GPG keys.

curl https://packages.microsoft.com/keys/microsoft.asc | sudo apt-key add -

curl https://packages.microsoft.com/config/ubuntu/16.04/prod.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/msprod.list

Update the sources list and run the installation command with the unixODBC developer package.
```
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install mssql-tools unixodbc-dev
```
Note
To update to the latest version of mssql-tools run the following commands:
```
sudo apt-get update 
sudo apt-get install mssql-tools 
```
Optional: Add /opt/mssql-tools/bin/ to your PATH environment variable in a bash shell.

To make sqlcmd/bcp accessible from the bash shell for login sessions, modify your PATH in the ~/.bash_profile file with the following command:
```
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bash_profile
```
To make sqlcmd/bcp accessible from the bash shell for interactive/non-login sessions, modify the PATH in the ~/.bashrc file with the following command:
```
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
```

Install tools on SLES 12

Use the following steps to install the mssql-tools on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server.

Add the Microsoft SQL Server repository to Zypper.

sudo zypper addrepo -fc https://packages.microsoft.com/config/sles/12/prod.repo 
sudo zypper --gpg-auto-import-keys refresh

Install mssql-tools with the unixODBC developer package.
```
sudo zypper install mssql-tools unixODBC-devel
```
Note
To update to the latest version of mssql-tools run the following commands:
```
sudo zypper refresh
sudo zypper update mssql-tools
```
Optional: Add /opt/mssql-tools/bin/ to your PATH environment variable in a bash shell.

To make sqlcmd/bcp accessible from the bash shell for login sessions, modify your PATH in the ~/.bash_profile file with the following command:
```
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bash_profile
```
To make sqlcmd/bcp accessible from the bash shell for interactive/non-login sessions, modify the PATH in the ~/.bashrc file with the following command:
```
echo 'export PATH="$PATH:/opt/mssql-tools/bin"' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
```

Install tools on macOS

A preview of sqlcmd and bcp is now available on macOS. For more information, see the announcement.

To install the tools for Mac El Capitan and Sierra, use the following commands:

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
#brew untap microsoft/mssql-preview if you installed the preview version 
brew tap microsoft/mssql-release https://github.com/Microsoft/homebrew-mssql-release
brew update
brew install --no-sandbox mssql-tools
#for silent install: 
#ACCEPT_EULA=y brew install --no-sandbox mssql-tools

Docker

Starting with SQL Server 2017 CTP 2.0, the SQL Server command-line tools are included in the Docker image. If you attach to the image with an interactive command-prompt, you can run the tools locally.

Offline installation

If your Linux machine does not have access to the online repositories used in the previous sections, you can download the package files directly. These packages are located in the Microsoft repository, https://packages.microsoft.com.

Tip

If you successfully installed with the steps in the previous sections, you do not need to download or manually install the package(s) below. This is only for the offline scenario.

The following table provides the location for the latest tools packages:

Tools package	Version	Download
Red Hat RPM tools package	14.0.5.0-1	mssql-tools RPM package
SLES RPM tools package	14.0.5.0-1	mssql-tools RPM package
Ubuntu 16.04 Debian tools package	14.0.5.0-1	mssql-tools Debian package
Ubuntu 16.10 Debian tools package	14.0.5.0-1	mssql-tools Debian package

These packages depend on msodbcsql, which must be installed first. The msodbcsql pacakage also has a dependency on either unixODBC-devel (RPM) or unixodbc-dev (Debian). The location of the msodbcsql packages are listed in the following table:

msodbcsql package	Version	Download
Red Hat RPM msodbcsql package	13.1.6.0-1	msodbcsql RPM package
SLES RPM msodbcsql package	13.1.6.0-1	msodbcsql RPM package
Ubuntu 16.04 Debian msodbcsql package	13.1.6.0-1	msodbcsql Debian package
Ubuntu 16.10 Debian msodbcsql package	13.1.6.0-1	msodbcsql Debian package

To manually install these packages, use the following steps:

Move the downloaded packages to your Linux machine. If you used a different machine to download the packages, one way to move the packages to your Linux machine is with the scp commmand.

Install the and packages: Install the mssql-tools and msodbc packages. If you get any dependency errors, ignore them until the next step.

Platform	Package install commands
Red Hat	`sudo yum localinstall msodbcsql-13.1.6.0-1.x86_64.rpm` `sudo yum localinstall mssql-tools-14.0.5.0-1.x86_64.rpm`
SLES	`sudo zypper install msodbcsql-13.1.6.0-1.x86_64.rpm` `sudo zypper install mssql-tools-14.0.5.0-1.x86_64.rpm`
Ubuntu	`sudo dpkg -i msodbcsql_13.1.6.0-1_amd64.deb` `sudo dpkg -i mssql-tools_14.0.5.0-1_amd64.deb`

Resolve missing dependencies: You might have missing dependencies at this point. If not, you can skip this step. In some cases, you must manually locate and install these dependencies.

For RPM packages, you can inspect the required dependencies with the following commands:
```
rpm -qpR msodbcsql-13.1.6.0-1.x86_64.rpm
rpm -qpR mssql-tools-14.0.5.0-1.x86_64.rpm
```
For Debian packages, if you have access to approved repositories containing those dependencies, the easiest solution is to use the apt-get command:
```
sudo apt-get -f install
```
Note
This command completes the installation of the SQL Server packages as well.

If this does not work for your Debian package, you can inspect the required dependencies with the following commands:
```
dpkg -I msodbcsql_13.1.6.0-1_amd64.deb | grep "Depends:"
dpkg -I mssql-tools_14.0.5.0-1_amd64.deb | grep "Depends:"
```

Next steps

For an example of how to use sqlcmd to connect to SQL Server and create a database, see one of the following quickstarts:

For an example of how to use bcp to bulk import and export data, see Bulk copy data to SQL Server on Linux.