Can't connect to localhost using Python's MySQLdb

Question

I'm new to this so probably have the wrong terminology but when I run the following script:

import MySQLdb

conn = MySQLdb.connect (host = 'localhost',
   user = 'erin',
   passwd = 'erin',
          db = 'sec')

I get the error:

  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg/MySQLdb/__init__.py", line 81, in Connect
    return Connection(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/Library/Python/2.6/site-packages/MySQL_python-1.2.3-py2.6-macosx-10.6-universal.egg/MySQLdb/connections.py", line 187, in __init__
    super(Connection, self).__init__(*args, **kwargs2)
_mysql_exceptions.OperationalError: (2002, "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock' (2)")

There is no file called mysql.sock in that directory but I don't know what a socket is or how to specify the correct location for it using the MySQLdb module.

Answer 1

I've managed to solve this by setting my host to "127.0.0.1" rather than "localhost".

Answer 2

if your mysql socket is not placed in /tmp/mysql.sock, you can specify it with

conn = MySQLdb.connect (unix_socket = 'path_to_your_socket', host = 'localhost', user = 'erin', passwd = 'erin', db = 'sec')

edit: for mamp on macosx the mysql socket path should be something like /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock