Could not connect to MySQL server MAMP Pro

Question

Alright after a whole day of researching and several attempts... I can't get this to work. It has worked in the past.

So, I launch mamp pro and I get a /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqlcheck: Got error: 1045: Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES) when trying to connect

I've exhausted lots of solutions. Tried to reset password by going to /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqladmin -u root -p password <newpassword>

Tried changing password in config.inc.php and /bin/mamp/index.php

Also tried killall -9 mysqld

here's my log

140225 16:52:58 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /Library/Application Support/appsolute/MAMP PRO/db/mysql 140225 16:52:58 [Warning] Using unique option prefix key_buffer instead of key_buffer_size is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Please use the full name instead. 140225 16:52:58 [Warning] Setting lower_case_table_names=2 because file system for /Library/Application Support/appsolute/MAMP PRO/db/mysql/ is case insensitive 140225 16:52:58 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. 140225 16:52:58 InnoDB: The InnoDB memory heap is disabled 140225 16:52:58 InnoDB: Mutexes and rw_locks use GCC atomic builtins 140225 16:52:58 InnoDB: Compressed tables use zlib 1.2.3 140225 16:52:58 InnoDB: Initializing buffer pool, size = 128.0M 140225 16:52:58 InnoDB: Completed initialization of buffer pool 140225 16:52:58 InnoDB: highest supported file format is Barracuda. 140225 16:52:58 InnoDB: Waiting for the background threads to start 140225 16:52:59 InnoDB: 5.5.33 started; log sequence number 97378002 140225 16:52:59 [Note] Event Scheduler: Loaded 0 events 140225 16:52:59 [Note] /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqld: ready for connections. Version: '5.5.33' socket: '/Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.sock' port: 0 Source distribution

I'm all out of ideas. Am I missing something?

Please help!

Answer 1

I don't really know the MAMP package, but the message /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqlcheck: Got error: 1045: Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES) when trying to connect suggests to me that MAMP is expecting the root password to be something and it's not. I suspect they've got information about how to change or reset your MySQL root password which would include this information for you.

Any chance you've reset or changed the password recently?

None of what you've done is designed to reset the password.

/Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/mysqladmin -u root -p password

is simply trying to connect to the mysqladmin program with the password password and, if it would be valid, would be a command passed to it, but it's not a valid mysqladmin command. mysqladmin documentation. Typical usage might be mysqladmin -u root -p foo create bar or mysqladmin -u root -p foo shutdown. Technically, there is a command to change a password, but I've never used it. Looking at the manual, it seems the syntax would be mysqladmin -u root -p foo password baz (where 'foo' is your password, 'password' is the literal word password, and 'baz' is your new password) but if you can't connect it won't just change it for you (and I've always used phpMyAdmin for changing passwords anyway).

Tried changing password in config.inc.php

I presume this is the phpMyAdmin configuration file, in which case you're changing the password attempted to use to connect, not the stored password. phpMyAdmin uses actual MySQL users for authentication, so you'll have to have a valid MySQL account to connect. If your auth_type is anything other than 'config', phpMyAdmin is prompting you for the usernamd and password anyway and disregarding anything hardcoded in to config.inc.php.

and /bin/mamp/index.php

I'm not sure what this is but it's likely the same story as config.inc.php; in all likelihood you're changing the password MAMP attempts to use when logging in, not the password that's stored in MySQL.

Also tried killall -9 mysqld

Well, that's just ungracefully brutally stopping ("killing") the MySQL daemon process without really giving it a chance to finish housekeeping (or writing to disk what it was working on) first, so you could end up with inconsistent data and I wouldn't recommend it unless mysqld has really hung up. You'll have to restart mysqld after running this command, which you've probably discovered already. There's generally no need to restart the mysqld process; the login credentials persist across sessions (it's stored in the mysql database), so a restart won't automatically let you in to the database.

It's possible the password is stored in my.cnf, I suggest you search your filesystem and see if that file exists and might have the password in a section such as

[client]
user=root
password=mypassword

If so you can update the password there.

The MySQL manual has information on resetting the root password, but I don't know MAMP and doing that might have unintended consequences (such as maintenance programs not being able to connect to the database; although that's sort of the problem you're in now anyway).