[SOLVED] MySQL ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket On Amazon Lightsail

I recently received an AWS Abuse report on one of my client’s AWS LightSail instances. Nothing was found on the detailed investigation, seemingly a false alarm. However, just to be on the safer side, I migrated the app to a new Lightsail instance.

After which, I was surprised to get a MySQL ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket error while testing the app post a successful migration!

I thought that somehow, the MySQL daemon had failed to start. Being on an Amazon Bitnami LAMP stack on lightsail, I tried the following:

sudo opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh restart

The command ran successfully but to my surprise, I still got the MySQL ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket error!

I then tried to first stop the process (apache, MySQL, and Php) and then start them again.

In order to do that, I did the following:

sudo opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh stop

followed by:

sudo opt/bitnami/ctlscript.sh start

I was surprised that it did not work on the first attempt itself when I tried restarting the MySql server.

The point here being, sometimes a restart doesn’t work you have to stop and then start a process in order to make it work!