mysql unknown variable ‘init_connect=set names utf8’

To set the default to UTF-8, you want to add the following to my.cnf

[client]
default-character-set=utf8

[mysql]
default-character-set=utf8


[mysqld]
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci
init-connect='SET NAMES utf8'
character-set-server = utf8

If you want to change the character set for an existing DB, let me know… your question didn’t specify it directly so I am not sure if that’s what you want to do.