Xampp: cannot connect to mysql from terminal

Question

I added export PATH=$PATH:/opt/lampp/bin/ to my ~/.zshrc file. I can access php but whenever I type sudo mysql -uroot I see the following message:

ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)

I can however, access mysql by defining full path like this: sudo /opt/lampp/bin/mysql -uroot. But I don't want that... I mean I would have to type the full path everytime or create an alias or symlink.

I am on Ubuntu 16.04 and using zshell.

Answer 1

You have two versions of mysql installed - one from Ubuntu repositories and one from some third party location. When you use the Ubuntu version, located in /usr/bin/mysql it attempt to connect trough a socket in the default location, /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock, which does not work, because the server running is not the Ubuntu stock mysql-server.

It works when you run /opt/lampp/bin/mysql -uroot (no reason to run that as root, by the way), because this mysql binary has default path set to where the actual socket is.

You have three alternatives:

1. Modify your path so that /opt/lampp/bin/ is before/usr/bin/` in path. This will execute the lampp version of mysql before the Ubuntu version.
2. Uninstall Ubuntu mysql client with sudo apt-get remove mysql-client. This may break other packages.
3. Uninstall lampp and install the required packages from Ubuntu.

#3 would be my preferred solution. Getting all the software from the repositories ensures that it will be kept up to date, be (mostly) compatible, and have a clear, well defined upgrade path to the next Ubuntu Release.

Apache, PHP, Mysql/MariaDB and a lot of apache modules are available in the Ubuntu repositories.