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Asked: 2026-06-08T02:58:34+00:00

I’m trying to get a crontab working for Cakephp (running on my shared Dreamhost

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I’m trying to get a crontab working for Cakephp (running on my shared Dreamhost server for now).

I have a shell set up as per the book, which works fine via either a cron run or manually executing (both via a shell file, e.g:

cron.sh
#########
cd /pathToApp/app/Console
/usr/local/bin/php cake.php updater list_reports

where updater is my shell and list_reports a method thereof.

The problem occurs when I try to access the database in the shell (“Using models in your shell”, same link).

Error Message:

Error: Database connection “SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Can’t connect to
local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock’ (2)”
is missing, or could not be created.

My DB Set-up (site works fine for http, do I need to add unix_socket or something?

array(
        'datasource' => 'Database/Mysql',
        'persistent' => false,
        'host' => 'mysql.mydomain.net',
        'port' => '3306',
        'login' => '*******',
        'password' => '*******',
        'database' => '*******',
        'prefix' => '',
    );

Thing I’ve tried:

  • Creating a symlink to /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock – permission denied
  • Can I even do this with shared hosting?
  • Tried various changes to the db settings above, no luck.
  • I note similar problems have been solved by people replacing localhost with 127.0.0.1, but I’m using a shared host, not local.
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    It’s official! I’m a db!

    I can confirm this problem was not caused by either Cakephp or Mysql, but rather for something I’d done myself and forgot about….

    I had a little switch in database.php to automatically detect whether I was in the dev, test, staging environment etc. I had the default set to local, and since the bash script didn’t pick up $_SERVER[‘SERVER_NAME’] which I was using for the switch, it defaulted to my local db.

    Thanks to ifunk for spotting the clue which enabled me to unravel this and get back on track!

    🙂

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