Understanding DB setup issues

Yes, it does tell me it cannot connect. But why? There can be a multitude of reasons why a connection fails. This is like telling a mechanic your car doesn’t move forward. A little more information would help to differentiate between a flat tire, the engine on fire, out of gas, etc.

I’ve checked the obvious several times – username, password, and database name. Localhost is correct and the database is up. Another PHP app came up without problems on the same system. So what’s the problem with WP?

I found out that the path to the mysql socket is different than most systems, so the solution was to use a named host rather than localhost.