Change Data Capture in MySQL/PHP by writing to a MySQL table (rather than streaming to Kafka/Rabbit/etc)? I have a small internal web app I'm developing with PHP and MySQL. I'm looking to sync client webpages to a server by requesting all changes since a certain date. 

I've found a number of solutions for doing this via a 3rd party Change Data Capture library in MySQL (Maxwell, Debezium, etc.), but they all seem to stream to Kafka or something similar. This is a smaller, simple project without any sort of message queue/broker. 

All I want is for changes to be recorded in the same MySQL database in a table with columns like the CRUD action, the table that changed, the table row ID, and the datetime. Then I could query for all rows changed since a certain date and time.

Is there a simple way or a library that can record this information right in the same MySQL database?
The most obvious solution to this would perhaps be to use triggers. You can have triggers that fire before/after inserts, deletes and updates on the table(s) in question, and then log the changes in your special table, including a time stamp and what type of write operation it was.

Another approach could be to use an audit plugin - MariaDB's audit plugin works with older versions of MySQL at least up to 5.5. MySQL has Enterprise Audit, which presumably has a proprietary licence. These plugins will log to a file, but you can set up a cron job or similar to load that into a database table.

(With MariaDB 10.3+ you would be able to use system-versioned tables which would allow you to store all changes to rows.)