PDO driver for XAMPP on Linux - linux

Question

I'm about to gain some experience on Yii so I set up a XAMPP (1.8.1) for Linux environment and installed the Yii framework.I progress based on the book titled 'Web Application Development with Yii and PHP' and there's an example to set up database connection and test that through the Yii console by running the following code:
echo Yii::app()->db->connectionString;
Of course previously I created the appropriate MySQL database and set up the connection string in corresponding main.php and console.php but I'm getting an error:
exception 'CDbException' with message 'CDbConnection failed to open the DB connection: could not find driver' in /work/webroot/yii/framework/db/CDbConnection.php:382
Based on Yii's requirement checker PDO for MySQL is enabled. If I check the HTML version of phpinfo it says:
PDO Driver for MySQL: Enabled
and
Client API version: mysqlnd 5.0.10 - 20111026 - $Id: b0b3b15c693b7f6aeb3aa66b646fee339f175e39 $
However if I run phpinfo from a Yii console it gives the following result:
PDO support => enabled
PDO drivers =>
So, for me it seems PDO driver is missing. I read several forum threads about how to download PDO drivers for linux and how to change the php.ini to use those drivers but I guess that solution works for CLI environment and not for XAMPP.
Can somebody help me out here how can I set up PDO driver for MySQL database on XAMPP? I'm using Ubuntu 13.10 desktop.

Answer 1

I was playing around for a while and found the solution with the help of several forum threads.
To resolve the following driver issue...
'CDbException' with message 'CDbConnection failed to open the DB connection: could not find driver'
... I had to install the correct connector. I ran the following:
sudo apt-get install php5-mysql
After that I tried to check the connection string once again via the Yii console by running code:
echo Yii::app()->db->connectionString;
But this time it gave me a different error mesage:
'CDbException' with message 'CDbConnection failed to open the DB connection: SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock'
To resolve this issue I changed my main.php and console.php under /protected/config directory and replaced 'localhost' to '127.0.0.1'.
Based on the PHP documentation this is required because MySQL Unix socket shouldn't be used with host or port.
This resolved the second error message and I could connect to my database.