I just got finished installing mysql on my droplet. I have set up and opened ports 80,443,(ssh) without a hiccup. My only problem now is that even though my droplet says that 3306 is open, I can't connect to it outside of ssh. It says that 3306/tcp is set to allow ANYWHERE but I still can't connect to it, even after a complete restart.
What IP address is MySQL listening on?
sudo netstat -plutn | grep 3306
If 127.0.0.1, then you will have to configure it to listen on all interfaces instead (127.0.0.1 and your droplet's IP address). Edit /etc/mysql/my.cnf and set bind-address to 0.0.0.0:
bind-address = 0.0.0.0
Then, restart MySQL:
sudo service mysql restart
If you're the only one who's going to access MySQL externally, it's recommended to keep it listening on 127.0.0.1 and using an SSH tunnel instead as it's much more secure:
Just an FYI, you should not forward MySQL outside of the machine it is on, especially not to 0.0.0.0
something else not mentioned here is that you need to ensure that your mysql users GRANT PRIVILEGES commands allow the IP / hostnames you connect in through
On this case, I was testing an mysql client to manage a non production database. Though this was back in January.