It is amazing that how much trouble I had trying to establish connection to local mysql server. A quick search on StackOverflow shows that I am not alone!

I think I found a surefire way to establish local mysql connections – use socket instead of TCP/IP. Briefly, there are two ways to establish mysql connections, either with TCP/IP (you need host and port number) or socket (you only need the filepath of the socket).

In theory, there shouldn’t be much difference between them. However, finding a file is definitely easier than finding the ip and the port number.

Here is the code to connect to a Mysql db from MAMP.

var mysql = require('mysql');

var connection = mysql.createConnection({
 user : 'root',
 password : "root",
socketPath : '/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock',

//for non MAMP, might be

//socketPath : '/tmp/mysql.sock',
});

connection.connect(function(err) {
 if (err) {
 console.log('db_connection_err', err);
 return;
 }
});

connection.query('SELECT 1 + 1 AS solution', function(err, rows, fields) {
 if (err) throw err;
console.log('The solution is: ', rows[0].solution);

});

connection.end();