ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/tmp/mysql.sock'

Question

I installed MySQL on Mac OS X Mountain Lion with homebrew install mysql, but when I tried mysql -u root I got the following error:

Answer 1

Encountered a similar problem after upgrading to Catalina OS. After running mysqld command, I found that there was some issue with the logs file. It could be different for others.

$ mysqld

Issue was

2019-10-16T04:58:59.174474Z 0 [ERROR] Could not open file '/var/log/mysql/error.log' for error logging: No such file or directory
2019-10-16T04:58:59.174508Z 0 [ERROR] Aborting

Resolved it by creating it and applying proper permissions.

sudo mkdir -p /var/log/mysql
sudo touch /var/log/mysql/error.log
sudo chown -R _mysql:mysql /var/log/mysql/

Restart MySQL

brew services restart mysql@5.7

Issue was resolved.

mysql -uroot -proot