# Arather basic and rather stupid MySQL question **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [August 3, 2007, 6:52pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/arather-basic-and-rather-stupid-mysql-question/111195 "2007-08-03T18:52:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2007, 6:52pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/arather-basic-and-rather-stupid-mysql-question/111195/1 "2007-08-03T18:52:35Z")
Email : removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid If I can do it then it can’t be done ! … - Anonymous As Dr. Nick of the Simpsons sez : Hi Everybody ! I’m trying to use Patrick Lenz’ Site Point book entitled “Build Your Own Ruby on Rails Web Applications” as a guide for my 1st Ruby on Rails project. > From here on in I’m going to refer to this book as : “BYORORWA”. Unfortunately, I’m stuck on Chapter 2 “Getting Started”. I’m working on a 1.8 GHz Mac running under Mac OSX 10.4.10 . According to “About This Mac” , “More Info …” the specific microprocessor my machine has is a : "CPU Type: PowerPC 970 (2.2) I actually gave up on the instructions for installing the Ruby on Rails development environment for Mac OSX given on pages 24 to 31 as I simply couldn’t get them to work. I then switched over to trying to install my Ruby on Rails development environment on Mac OSX using the HiveLogic article entitled “Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X” by Dan Benjamin. The earl for this article is located at : [Dan Benjamin](http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/ruby-rails-mongrel-mysql-osx) I’m reasonably sure that I’ve correctly installed everything because if I do the following : 1. Open up a Terminal window. 2. Enter the command “cd cyf” to change the directory to the RoR project I’ve created (which is called “cyf”). 3. Enter the command “script/server” to start up the Mongrel web server for this project. 4. Fire up the Safari application. 5. Enter the earl “[http://localhost:3000/](http://localhost:3000/)” in the earl display/input field at the top of the Safari application. 6. Click on the “About your application’s environment” earl in the “Welcome Aboard” page that typing in the previous step brings up. I get the following text displayed in a yellow box : Ruby version : 1.8.6 (powerpc-darwin8.10.0) RubyGems version : 0.9.2 Rails version : 1.2.3 Active Record version : 1.15.3 Action Pack version : 1.13.3 Active Web Service version : 1.2.3 Action Mailer version : 1.3.3 Active Support version : 1.4.2 Application root version : /Users/simonwhelan/cyf Environment version : development Database adapter version : mysql My problem ? Well, I believe my problem is 2 fold; i.e. : 1. It looks to me as though the MySQL client is not able to connect to the MySQL server. 2. I’m too ignorant and inexperienced to be sure that I’m doing things properly and I don’t know how to properly interpret the diagnostics I’m getting much less fix the problems I think I’m having. I should point out here that I’ve successfully installed the MySQL System Preferences panel. It is set to “Automatically Start MySQL Server on Startup”. When I bring up the MySQL System Preferences panel to have a look, it sez : “The MySQL Server Instance is running”. The string “running” is display in a rather attractive lime green color. It looks to me like I’ve successfully installed MySQL 5.0.45-osx10.4 in the directory “/usr/local/mysql”. If I ‘cd’ to that directory and enter ‘ls’, I get the following : COPYING data scripts EXCEPTIONS-CLIENT docs share INSTALL-BINARY include sql-bench README lib support-files bin man tests configure mysql-test yo.txt If I type in : “cd /usr/local/mysql/bin” followed by “ls” the Terminal window then displays the following : CMakeLists.txt mysqld-debug comp\_err mysqld\_multi comp\_sql.c mysqld\_safe make\_sharedlib\_distribution mysqldump make\_win\_bin\_dist mysqldumpslow make\_win\_src\_distribution mysqlhotcopy msql2mysql mysqlimport my\_print\_defaults mysqlmanager myisam\_ftdump mysqlshow myisamchk mysqltest myisamlog mysqltestmanager myisampack mysqltestmanager-pwgen mysql mysqltestmanagerc mysql\_client\_test ndb\_config mysql\_config ndb\_cpcd mysql\_convert\_table\_format ndb\_delete\_all mysql\_explain\_log ndb\_desc mysql\_find\_rows ndb\_drop\_index mysql\_fix\_extensions ndb\_drop\_table mysql\_fix\_privilege\_tables ndb\_error\_reporter mysql\_fix\_privilege\_tables\_sql.c ndb\_mgm mysql\_secure\_installation ndb\_mgmd mysql\_setpermission ndb\_restore mysql\_tableinfo ndb\_select\_all mysql\_tzinfo\_to\_sql ndb\_select\_count mysql\_upgrade ndb\_show\_tables mysql\_upgrade\_shell ndb\_size.pl mysql\_waitpid ndb\_test\_platform mysql\_zap ndb\_waiter mysqlaccess ndbd mysqlaccess.conf perror mysqladmin replace mysqlbinlog resolve\_stack\_dump mysqlbug resolveip mysqlcheck safe\_mysqld mysqld The directory listing displayed immediately above looks to me like all the binaries needed for a successful MySQL installation under Mac OSX are where they’re supposed to be (bearing in mind, of course, that I’m really pretty much a MySQL ignoramus and I really don’t know what I’m talking about). If I open up a Terminal window and type in the following string : “ps - ax | grep mysql”. The Terminal window then displays the following text : 215 ?? S 0:00.03 /bin/sh ./bin/mysqld\_safe --datadir=/usr/local/ mysql/dat 234 ?? S 0:01.19 /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld --basedir=/usr/ local/mysql - 268 p1 U+ 0:00.00 grep mysql I’m assuming here that this mans the MySQL is running properly. But, to tell you the truth, I’m too ignorant and inexperienced to really know whether this is true or not. On page 30 of BYORORWA Patrick tells me to type into the Terminal Window : “mysqld”. When I do that I get the following text displaying in the Terminal window : simon-whelans-power-mac-g5:/usr/local/mysql/bin simonwhelan$ mysqld 070802 20:26:26 [Warning] Can’t create test file /usr/local/ mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-powerpc/data/simon-whelans-power-mac-g5.lower- test 070802 20:26:26 [Warning] Can’t create test file /usr/local/ mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-powerpc/data/simon-whelans-power-mac-g5.lower- test mysqld: Can’t change dir to ‘/usr/local/mysql-5.0.45-osx10.4-powerpc/ data/’ (Errcode: 13) 070802 20:26:26 [ERROR] Aborting 070802 20:26:26 [Note] mysqld: Shutdown complete The bottom of page 30 of BYORORW sez I should get text that looks something like the following : Welcome to the MySQL monitor. Commands end with : or \g. Your MySQL connection id is 8 to server version 5.0.45 Type ‘help’ or ‘\h’ for help. Type ‘\c’ to clear the buffer. Clearly something is wrong. The problem is that I don’t know what went wrong nor do I know how to fix it. It occurred to me that I might not be entering the right command so I tried a few others; i.e. : When I typed in “mysql”, I got : ERROR 1045 (28000): Access denied for user ‘simonwhelan’@‘localhost’ (using password: NO) When I typed in “mysql\_safe”, I got : touch: /usr/local/mysql/data/simon-whelans-power-mac-g5.local.err: Permission denied chown: /usr/local/mysql/data/simon-whelans-power-mac-g5.local.err: Permission denied Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /usr/local/mysql/data /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld\_safe: line 380: /usr/local/mysql/data/ simon-whelans-power-mac-g5.local.err: Permission denied rm: /tmp/mysql.sock: Permission denied rm: /usr/local/mysql/data/simon-whelans-power-mac-g5.local.pid: Permission denied /usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld\_safe: line 386: /usr/local/mysql/data/ simon-whelans-power-mac-g5.local.err: Permission denied STOPPING server from pid file /usr/local/mysql/data/simon-whelans- power-mac-g5.local.pid tee: /usr/local/mysql/data/simon-whelans-power-mac-g5.local.err: Permission denied 070802 20:27:07 mysqld ended tee: /usr/local/mysql/data/simon-whelans-power-mac-g5.local.err: Permission denied When I typed in “mysqltest”, I got : mysqltest: Could not open connection ‘default’: 1045 Access denied for user ‘simonwhelan’@‘localhost’ (using password: NO) not ok Clearly something is wrong. The problem is, as I’ve said more than once above I really don’t know enough about what I’m doing to understand what the problem is much less fix it. So folks, my questions are : 1. What’s wrong; i.e. : why am I not getting text displaying on the Terminal window more or less like the text that Patrick sez I should be getting on the bottom of page 30 of BYORORW ? 2. What do I need to do to fix the problem; i.e. : get text displaying in my Terminal window that at least displays the text that Patrick claims I should be getting ? Any advice, suggestions and help that you could send my way would be greatly appreciated ! Just think, if I can solve this problem then I can move on to actual Ruby and Rails problems rather than set up and installation problems ! Oh, Joy ! All the best & I hope to hear from you soon … Simon. ---
**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2007, 7:31pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/arather-basic-and-rather-stupid-mysql-question/111195/2 "2007-08-03T19:31:39Z")
Hey Simon, fret not! First, there’s the instructions from MySQL: [http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mac-os-x-installation.html](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/mac-os-x-installation.html) Second, if you can’t get that running properly there is an article at Apple on building from source (although that makes keeping the system current a little more difficult for non-unix types): [http://developer.apple.com/internet/opensource/osdb.html](http://developer.apple.com/internet/opensource/osdb.html) Even harder than that, will be the magic, top-secret voodoo required to get ruby-mysql installed on OS X, to which I have yet to accomplish. Being a PostgreSQL homer means I just did everything in PostgreSQL, but I will eventually need to have access to MySQL from Ruby. Anyone else out there know the trick to get ruby-mysql to build with the stock MySQL dmg provided by [MySQL.com](http://MySQL.com)? – Mitch ---
**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2007, 7:35pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/arather-basic-and-rather-stupid-mysql-question/111195/3 "2007-08-03T19:35:12Z")
removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid wrote: > Email : removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid > > As Dr. Nick of the Simpsons sez : I will stat by applauding your thoroughness in prodivifn as much information as possible. The being said… I felt flooded. 😉 Some thing you needs to understand. 1. Your mysql seems to be installed properly. Executing ‘mysql’ will try and fired up the client, since you have provided no parameters it will assume defaults. So what’s doing behind the scenes is that it’s connecting as you “Simon” but your user may have no permissions. Try connecting as ‘su’ and then "GRANT"ing permission to your username. ex: mysql -uroot -p mysql Then read here for info on CREATING a database and GRANT(ing) permissions to a user FOR That database. [http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/create-database.html](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/create-database.html) [http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/grant.html](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/grant.html) Moving along… Once this is done you now need to CONFIGURE rails to use that database. You do that by editing the database.yml file in “your project”/config folder. put in the appropriate username / password and database (you’ve hopefully just setup in mysql above) and you’re home free. Once you get this done, let us know if you have any more problems. Thanks and I hope this helps. ---
**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\ **Post date:** [August 3, 2007, 7:54pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/arather-basic-and-rather-stupid-mysql-question/111195/4 "2007-08-03T19:54:42Z")
Quoting Mitch P. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid), who spaketh thusly: > Anyone > else out there know the trick to get ruby-mysql to build with the > stock MySQL dmg provided by [MySQL.com](http://MySQL.com)? I just tried the following line: sudo gem install mysql – –with-mysql-config=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql\_config …from the Hivelogic narrative: > **[Dan Benjamin](https://danbenjamin.com)** > > Dan Benjamin's personal website. …and it worked. I must have had something stale lying around when I tried earlier, hrm. – Mitch ---
**Author:** ![casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/c/58956e/32.png) [@casper\_the\_ghost](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/casper_the_ghost)\ **Post date:** [August 4, 2007, 8:45pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/arather-basic-and-rather-stupid-mysql-question/111195/5 "2007-08-04T20:45:49Z")
Email : removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid If I can do it then it can’t be done ! … - Anonymous Hi Mitch & Jean : 1st off, I’d like to thank you for your help and suggestions. THANK YOU !!! I’m glad to hear that I at least seem to have installed MySQL properly. At least I’m able to do at least something right. Unfortunately, I’m just too ignorant of the basics of both Unix command lines and MySQL commands to understand them. But, before I get into plumbing the depths of my Unix/MySQL ignorance I figure I should give you the source for the rails file that contains the configuration data for using the database. If I’ve got this right, it’s located in a file called : “/Development/ Users/cyf/config/database.yml” (by the way, just in case you’re wondering, ‘cyf’ is the name of my Ruby on Rails project). That file contains the following text : \ # MySQL (default setup). Versions 4.1 and 5.0 are recommended. # # Install the MySQL driver: # gem install mysql # On MacOS X: # gem install mysql – --include=/usr/local/lib # On Windows: # gem install mysql # Choose the win32 build. # Install MySQL and put its /bin directory on your path. # # And be sure to use new-style password hashing: # [http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/old-client.html](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/old-client.html) development: adapter: mysql database: cyf\_development username: root password: socket: /tmp/mysql.sock # Warning: The database defined as ‘test’ will be erased and # re-generated from your development database when you run ‘rake’. # Do not set this db to the same as development or production. test: adapter: mysql database: cyf\_test username: root password: socket: /tmp/mysql.sock production: adapter: mysql database: cyf\_production username: root password: socket: /tmp/mysql.sock \ The problem is that I have no idea what : Try \_connecting as ‘su’ and then "GRANT"ing permission to your username. ex: mysql -uroot -p mysql means. If have no idea what “connecting as su” means. I also have no idea how to go about "“GRANT"ing permission to your username.”. If I fire up a Terminal window and I type in : su mysql -uroot -p mysql followed by pressing the “Return” key I get : Password: If I type in my password (which I think is “simon”) followed by pressing the 'Return" key, I get the following : su: Sorry simon-whelans-power-mac-g5:~ simonwhelan$ The truth is I’m not even sure what my “username” (I think it’s “simonwhelan”) and what my “password” (I think it’s “simon”) are. So, at this point, given my abysmal ignorance of both Unix and MySQL, the questions I need to ask are as follows : 1. What is my “username” ? 2. How do I find my “username” ? 3. What is my “password” ? 4. How do I find my “password” ? 5. How EXACTLY do I go about “GRANT"ing permission to my username” ? I realize that to someone who is both familiar with Unix and comfortable with MySQL that my questions may seem both rudimentary and ridiculous to the point of being insulting but the simple, sad and sordid truth is that I am actually that ignorant of the both intricacies of Unix and the workings of MySQL. I’m also confused by the following sentence : Then read here for info on CREATING a database and GRANT(ing) \_permissions to a user FOR That database. Patrick Lenz makes no mention of these steps on page 30 of BYORORWA. Did he forget to mention that you have to both create a database and then grant permissions to use it or I am I missing something here ? I’m inferring (perhaps incorrectly) that the database has already been both created and its permissions granted from my reading of Lenz’s rather skimpy text regarding this on pages 29-31 under the section entitled : “Installing MySQL on a Mac”. Did he leave stuff out or am I missing something because I just don’t know enough about both Unix and MySQL ? I have to tell you that I have the distinct (and quite possibly erroneous) impression that Lenz didn’t even both testing his Mac OSX instructions to verify that they actually work. Anyhow, any advice, suggestions and help that you could send my way would be greatly appreciated ! And, by the way, thank you for all the help you’ve so kindly sent me so far ! All the best & I hope to hear from you soon … Simon.