SQLSTATE HY000 1045 Access denied for user username localhost using CakePHP

Question

I'm new to CakePHP and PHP. While using CakePHP to wire my database, I keep running into issues.

I'm using the Bitnami 5.4.40-0 WAMP stack. I am building a web MVC application with CakePHP 3.0.4. My application configuration is shown below.

Entry for data sources in my app.php file.

/**
 * Connection information used by the ORM to connect
 * to your application's datastores.
 * Drivers include Mysql Postgres Sqlite Sqlserver
 * See vendor\cakephp\cakephp\src\Database\Driver for complete list
 */
'Datasources' => [
    'default' => [
        'className' => 'Cake\Database\Connection',
        'driver' => 'Cake\Database\Driver\Mysql',
        'persistent' => false,
        'host' => 'localhost',
        /**
         * CakePHP will use the default DB port based on the driver selected
         * MySQL on MAMP uses port 8889, MAMP users will want to uncomment
         * the following line and set the port accordingly
         */
        //'port' => 'nonstandard_port_number',
        'username' => 'test2',
        'password' => 'computer',
        'database' => 'jobs',
        'encoding' => 'utf8',
        'timezone' => 'UTC',
        'cacheMetadata' => true,

        /**
         * Set identifier quoting to true if you are using reserved words or
         * special characters in your table or column names. Enabling this
         * setting will result in queries built using the Query Builder having
         * identifiers quoted when creating SQL. It should be noted that this
         * decreases performance because each query needs to be traversed and
         * manipulated before being executed.
         */
        'quoteIdentifiers' => false,

        /**
         * During development, if using MySQL < 5.6, uncommenting the
         * following line could boost the speed at which schema metadata is
         * fetched from the database. It can also be set directly with the
         * mysql configuration directive 'innodb_stats_on_metadata = 0'
         * which is the recommended value in production environments
         */
        //'init' => ['SET GLOBAL innodb_stats_on_metadata = 0'],
    ],

In accordance with CakePHP guidelines, I have previously built a database table called jobs. The root administrator and user test2 both have the same global privileges. But I'm receiving the following problem when I use the bake all command:

2015-07-01 06:24:56 Error: [PDOException] SQLSTATE[HY000] [1045] Access denied for user 'test2'@'localhost' (using password: YES)
Stack Trace:
C:\Bitnami\wampstack-5.4.40-0\apache2\htdocs\myjobs\vendor\cakephp\cakephp\src\Database\Driver\PDODriverTrait.php(48): PDO->__construct('mysql:host=127....', 'test2', 'computer', Array)
C:\Bitnami\wampstack-5.4.40-0\apache2\htdocs\myjobs\vendor\cakephp\cakephp\src\Database\Driver\Mysql.php(89): Cake\Database\Driver\Mysql->_connect('mysql:host=127....', Array)
C:\Bitnami\wampstack-5.4.40-0\apache2\htdocs\myjobs\vendor\cakephp\cakephp\src\Database\Schema\BaseSchema.php(46): Cake\Database\Driver\Mysql->connect()

Can someone please help me with this?

Answer 1

This error message typically indicates that a matching MySQL user doesn't exist (hasn't been created) or that the password we are using doesn't match what MySQL thinks the password should be for the user we are connecting with.

A user's username ("test2") and host are used to identifying them in MySQL ("localhost").

The host ("localhost") and user ("test2") values are mentioned in the error message.

 'test2'@'localhost'

We can check to see if the user exists, using this query from a client we can connect from:

 SELECT user, host FROM mysql.user

We're looking for a row that has "test2" for user, and "localhost" for host.

 user     host       
 -------  -----------
 test2     127.0.0.1  cleanup
 test2     ::1        
 test2     localhost  

The host may be set to the wildcard value of % if that row is absent in order to match any other host that doesn't match.

If the row is present, the password might not be correct. Changing the password is possible if we are connected as a user with the necessary rights, such as root.

 SET PASSWORD FOR 'test2'@'localhost' = PASSWORD('mysecretcleartextpassword')

We can also verify that the user has privileges on objects in the database.

 GRANT SELECT ON jobs.* TO 'test2'@'localhost' 

I hope this helps you.