Deploying Group Replication in Single-Primary Mode To check that the plugin was installed successfully, issue  SHOW PLUGINS;  and check the output. It should show something like this: 18.2.1.5 Bootstrapping the Group The process of starting a group for the first time is called bootstrapping. You use the group_replication_bootstrap_group  system variable to bootstrap a group. The bootstrap should only be done by a single server, the one that starts the group and only once. This is why the value of the group_replication_bootstrap_group  option was not stored in the instance’s option file. If it is saved in the option file, upon restart the server automatically bootstraps a second group with the same name. This would result in two distinct groups with the same name. The same reasoning applies to stopping and restarting the plugin with this option set to  ON . Therefore to safely bootstrap the group, connect to s1 and issue the following statements: mysql>  SET GLOBAL group_replication_bootstrap_group=ON; mysql>  START GROUP_REPLICATION; mysql>  SET GLOBAL group_replication_bootstrap_group=OFF; mysql>  SET GLOBAL group_replication_bootstrap_group=ON; mysql>  START GROUP_REPLICATION USER=’ rpl_user ’, PASSWORD=’ password ’; mysql>  SET GLOBAL group_replication_bootstrap_group=OFF; Or if you are providing user credentials for distributed recovery on the  START GROUP_REPLICATION statement (which you can from MySQL 8.0.21), issue the following statements: Once the  START GROUP_REPLICATION  statement returns, the group has been started. You can check that the group is now created and that there is one member in it: For the purpose of demonstrating that the server is indeed in a group and that it is able to handle load, create a table and add some content to it. The information in this table confirms that there is a member in the group with the unique identifier ce9be252-2b71-11e6-b8f4-00212844f856 , that it is  ONLINE  and is at  s1  listening for client connections on port  3306 . Check the content of table  t1  and the binary log. 3709 mysql>  SELECT * FROM t1; +----+------+ | c1 | c2 | mysql>  CREATE DATABASE test; mysql>  USE test; mysql>  CREATE TABLE t1 (c1 INT PRIMARY KEY, c2 TEXT NOT NULL); mysql>  INSERT INTO t1 VALUES (1, ’Luis’); mysql>  SHOW PLUGINS; +----------------------------+----------+--------------------+----------------------+-------------+ | Name | Status | Type | Library | License | +----------------------------+----------+--------------------+----------------------+-------------+ | binlog | ACTIVE | STORAGE ENGINE | NULL | PROPRIETARY | (...) | group_replication | ACTIVE | GROUP REPLICATION | group_replication.so | PROPRIETARY | +----------------------------+----------+--------------------+----------------------+-------------+ | CHANNEL_NAME | MEMBER_ID | MEMBER_HOST | MEMBER_PORT | | group_replication_applier | ce9be252-2b71-11e6-b8f4-00212844f856 | s1 | 3306 | ONLINE mysql>  SELECT * FROM performance_schema.replication_group_members;