What is the socket declaration for, in Ruby on Rails database.yml?

Question

What\'s the use of socket declaration in config/database.yml ?

Example code:

staging:
  adapter: mysql
  encoding: utf8
  database: (database)
  pool         


        

Answer 1

MySQL has two methods of communicating with it on unix-ish systems, tcp/ip and domain sockets. By specifying the socket Rails, or rather the database driver, will use the socket instead of a network connection. It can be quicker to use the socket but YMMV.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/connecting.html