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I just finished fixing the blog and forums of one Doctor Pantzo, unleashing no doubt a fury of obscenities upon an unsuspecting galaxy. Here’s how.

For whatever reason, MySQL’s socket file in Tiger no longer lives at /var/mysql/mysql.sock, but at /tmp/mysql.sock. This wreaks minor havoc with things like Wordpress and phpBB, because PHP’s mysql extension assumes the incorrect location for the file. The main symptom is a failure to connect to the database. Wordpress unhelpfully suggests that you check your username and password, while phpBB just dies with a lot of php mysql_connect barf.

The solution seems to be to specify the socket file path as part of the database hostname when configuring these (and other) applications, since most will pass the hostname you specify directly to mysql_connect(), which will take it as a valid parameter.

For Wordpress, change DB_HOST in wp-config.php like this:

define('DB_HOST', 'localhost:/tmp/mysql.sock');

For phpBB, change $dbhost in config.php like this:

$dbhost = 'localhost:/tmp/mysql.sock';

More about this is on the Wordpress support forums.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Fixing things. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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