Connecting to MySQL via a socket file

Problem

I want to use TurboGears, but my machine is set up with MySQL not bound to a network socket and I get the following errors when I try to connect: _mysql_exceptions.OperationalError?: (2002, “Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’ (2)”);

Solution

There is a practice of not binding MySQL to an IP address and port following the principle that “if you’re not connected, you are protected.” In this situation, the server has a socket file. By default TurboGears (or SQLObject and the Python MySQL driver/client to be more exact) will look for the socket file in /tmp/mysql.sock. Many installations seem to use /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock. Therefore, to get TurboGears to work, you’ll need to specify the unix_socket (if on Unix) param in the dburi. You can find out where your mysql socket is by looking at the file my.cnf, which usually resides in /etc/my.cnf or /etc/mysql/my.cnf.

Format

sqlobject.dburi="!mysql://username:password@/databasename?unix_socket=path-to-mysql.sock"

Example

I have my socket file in /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock and I want my user foo with password bar to connect to my db test1.

sqlobject.dburi="!mysql:/foo:bar@/test1?unix_socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock"