No such file or directory - /tmp/mysql.sock

Sun Jul 11 05:02:51 2010

I've been playing around with a little Ruby on Rails recently and while trying to connect to my MAMP development databases, I came across the following error when using rake db:migrate.

No such file or directory - /tmp/mysql.sock

I have to admit that this baffled me for a while, but after reading around on the net, it suddenly hit me. 'I'd been having one of my stupid moments', I thought as I added the following line to my database.yml file

socket: /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock

I'd been looking for a file in a place where one had no right to be. Why on earth would there be a mysql.sock when there was no sql database? All my development database reside inside MAMP, so it makes sense then that that is where I would find my mysql.sock file.

I realize that this isn't really a big problem for most, but I thought that this could be a potential blind spot for other PHP developers new to Rails and thought I'd best help out.