WordPress "error establishing a database connection" on OS X Leopard

Alf Mikula

— December 18, 2007

Thanks, that worked like a charm!

Dibi Store

— January 9, 2008

Hey thanks you!

kw

— March 3, 2008

Cool… can you edit php.ini with pico? It makes more sense to me.

I’m on 10.4 but am going to give it a try… thanks for the tip!

The Paradiso » Wordpress “error establishing a database connection” on OS X Leopard

— March 20, 2008

[...] From : http://bustoutsolutions.com/blog/2007/12/13/wordpress-error-establishing-a-database-connection-on-os… [...]

Wordpress Themes

— March 25, 2008

How effective has wordpress been on Mac? I have not heard alot about its use on Mac.

Jeff

— March 26, 2008

@Wordpress Themes, It doesn’t matter if you’re running a Mac or a PC or anything else for that matter, as long as you have the correct versions of PHP and MySQL. See http://wordpress.org/about/requirements/ for more info.

:(

— April 3, 2008

What does that mean? Lol.

L. S.

— May 2, 2008

Yes, that works, but don’t chmod 777; you end up giving anyone the right to edit that file and possibly hack parts of your system. Just set the “mysql socket” line mentioned.

L. S.

— May 2, 2008

Yes, that works, but don’t chmod 777; you end up giving anyone the right to edit that file and possibly hack parts of your system. Just set the “mysql socket” line mentioned. There shouldn’t even be a “7″ anywhere in those permissions.

bimble

— May 16, 2008

Brilliant, worked perfectly. and even better, you were the first hit in google

Wordpress on OS X Tiger - “error establishing a database connection”

— May 31, 2008

[...] info on locating and modifying your php.ini file, see the Bust Out Solutions [...]

Leslie Wong

— October 20, 2008

Thanks for this tip. It worked for me in Tiger, 10.4.11 on a PowerBook G4 12″.

Chris

— April 1, 2009

Absolutely amazing, this one frustrated me for a long time. One thing to note is that I have found multiple possible causes for this. For future people coming here, to diagnose whether this is the issue causing the problem it is useful to add:

echo(mysql_error());

to the wp-db.php file within the wp-includes directory just before the html for the error is printed. If it mentions socks in the output error message on refresh, you can know this is the problem. cheers!

Michael Grech

— September 9, 2009

Good work, this works on Snow Leopard as well.

thiudis

— October 21, 2009

Thanks – worked great!

Spenser

— July 21, 2010

Thanks for this. @Chris, good advice for future errors.

Dave White

— August 30, 2010

Thanks for the fix. What was strange for me was that everything was working fine one day and the next I was getting this error. I did run a security update from Apple in between though.

Stephan Kristyn

— October 20, 2010

Great! I will mention this in my blog article at http://meshfields.de/install-magento-on-unix/

» Install Magento on Unix with mcrypt

— November 23, 2010

[...] Make sure you have php.ini in the /etc directory. It will probably be php.ini.default to start, particularly if you have just done the Snow Leopard upgrade, so rename it with cp or mv. Ensure that you have enable_dl = On but do not remove the ; in front of ;extension_dir = "./". Add one line to the .ini file in the Dynamic Extensions section. extension=mcrypt.so. Also comment out the line that contains /var/mysql/mysql.sock or change the path to /tmp/mysql.sock. The default mysql.sock location in the php.ini.default file is a bug. In case you are running in problems with your other databases it is always a good idea on MacOSX to use the /tmp/mysql.sock path because this reportedly solved problems in the past as desrcibed here. [...]

Issues caused by upgrade to Snow Leopard « Helmers Software

— December 19, 2010

[...] When I tried to access my local WordPress instance in the browser it started complaining “Error establishing a database connection“. It turned out that (again) the upgrade had thrown away a file, this time the victim was /private/etc/php/ini. This guy has the solution: [...]