Installing and configuring MySQL is an extremely common task. You can, therefore, find it in prebuilt images or in scripts that build entire stacks for you. A common stack is called the LAMP stack, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, and many VPS providers provide a one-click LAMP stack image.
As we will use Linux and have already installed Apache manually, after installing MySQL, we'll be very close to the traditional LAMP stack; we will just use the P for Python instead of PHP. In keeping with our goal of "education first", we'll install MySQL manually, and configure it through the command line instead of installing a GUI control panel. If you've used MySQL before, feel free to set it up as you see fit.
MySQL and Git