Question

Ran apt update and apt upgrade and I cannot access WordPress admin area

I really hope someone can help me out with an issue I’m facing. I have a droplet with WordPress on a LAMP stack. This evening I ssh’d into my droplet and ran apt-get update and upgrade where some mysql and php packages were fetched and installed. I then went to the browser where I had I was already logged into the WordPress dashboard, I started using it, but was soon met with an error that read: Error establishing a database connection. I went back into ssh and enabled debugging and reloaded the page in the browser and have a little more info. The full error (warning) is: Warning: mysqli_real_connect(): (HY000/2002): No such file or directory in /var/www/html/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 1753 No such file or directory

I’m not exactly sure where to start in fixing this issue. Any help would be appreciated!

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alexdo
Site Moderator
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• April 1, 2022

Hello there,

We have an article on How To Debug the WordPress "Error Establishing Database Connection which you can check here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-debug-the-wordpress-error-establishing-database-connection

As for the apt-update and apt-upgrade process of the droplet, I’ll recommend first creating a backup of the site (or taking a snapshot of the droplet) before pushing the update/upgrade. In this way, you’ll have a recovery point in case something goes wrong.

Hope that this helps!

KFSys
Site Moderator
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• April 1, 2022

Hi @jplafata,

The first error Error establishing a database connection was related to your MySQL instance, most probably it was down and it had to be started again :

  1. systemctl start mysql

The next error

mysqli_real_connect(): (HY000/2002): No such file or directory in /var/www/html/wp-includes/wp-db.php on line 1753 No such file or directory

Now that is related to your WordPress installation. It’s really weird that after an apt-get update and upgrade on your Droplet this has appeared as the two (upgrades and your WordPress) are totally different processes. Having said that, I suspect this is related to your MySQL. Check your wp_config.php and make sure you have the proper details configured there for your DB.

Then make sure your MySQL instance is running:

  1. systemctl status mysql

  2. systemctl restart mysql