I just upgraded to PHP 5.3 on my Windows development box, and ran into an issue making any database connection with the MySQL and MySQLi drivers. Pages not making any database connections worked fine, but any page with a database connection would sit and hang for about a minute, and then throw an error.
PHP Warning: mysqli::mysqli(): [2002] A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not (trying to connect via tcp://localhost:3306) in xxx.php on line 2
PHP Warning: mysqli::mysqli(): (HY000/2002): A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond.
in xxx.php on line 2
PHP bug #45150 suggests that this is due to issues resolving localhost on Windows. This is partially correct, more specifically it's an issue with localhost resolving to ::1 when IPv6 is enabled.
While it feels like Windows has shoehorned in IPv6 support, the blame seems to lie with MySQL, which won't support IPv6 until version 6.0.
I'm not sure why the timeout isn't instant, the port is closed, so it could be partially a problem with PHP or Windows.
> nmap -sT -p 80,3306,3389 -6 ::1 Starting Nmap 5.00 ( http://nmap.org ) at 2009-11-20 15:48 Mountain Standard Time Interesting ports on cfg64 (::1): PORT STATE SERVICE 80/tcp closed http 3306/tcp closed mysql 3389/tcp open ms-term-serv Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 3.14 seconds
The Fix
Open up %windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts with a text editor and comment out the line that looks like:
::1 localhost
Prefix it with a #, like so:
#::1 localhost
Save it and your PHP/MySQL connections will immediately begin working. You could also use 127.0.0.1 in your connection string instead of localhost, but I didn't want to change code in innumerable files.
Tags: IPv6, MySQL, PHP, Windows
November 23rd, 2009 at 11:11 am
Thak's, it works great!
November 24th, 2009 at 8:27 am
Hello,
I get these error messages constantly on my server. But when I go to the hosts file, it only has
127.0.0.1 localhost – in my experience I've never seen ::1 localhost
November 24th, 2009 at 8:53 am
@Brian Meissen – ::1 is the IPv6 loopback address. If you're on running Windows XP you won't see it unless you've explicitly installed IPv6 support. It's enabled by default in Vista, 7 and Server 2008.
November 24th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Thanks so much Corey for sharing this information.
Best Regards
November 28th, 2009 at 6:06 pm
Thank you SOOO much for this. I just upgraded my server at home to a copy of Windows 7 and after re-installing all the required applications, I went to re-setup the database for the website I've been working on… and I kept getting that stupid timeout error. I finally found a semi-solution to change everything to 127.0.0.1, but I wondered what was making it do that considering that I never had that problem in the past and have always been okay with just using 'localhost.' This was a great solution. Thank you very much.
November 30th, 2009 at 3:25 am
I am using windows 7 and the hosts file was empty, everything was commented. I had to enable the line with 127.0.0.1 localhost to make it work in my case.
December 7th, 2009 at 12:57 pm
Wonderful. Thanks for the post. Worked great.
December 10th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Thank you so much, I've been trying to figure this out for the last hour!
December 12th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Thank you very much for the contribution =D. I solve my problem as say sacabonos
December 19th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
Thanks for the useful post man.. I was going crazy over these errors..
December 26th, 2009 at 5:03 pm
[...] In der etc/hosts festlegen, dass 127.0.0.1 auf localhost liegt und nicht ::1. Ein Fehler im MySQL-Treiber kommt nicht mit IPv6 klar und sämtliche PHP-Webseiten hängen einfach beim mysql_connect. Mit MySQL 6 wird alles besser [...]
January 3rd, 2010 at 11:42 am
[...] to Corey Gilmore for documenting it; I figure the more people get it online the quicker it will be for people to [...]
January 14th, 2010 at 1:21 am
Awesome – thanks for sharing – fixed it for me! :)
January 30th, 2010 at 10:05 am
Great. I just changed "localhost" in my connection to "127.0.0.1" and all is well with the world again. I found your post quickly too. Just copied the entire error I was getting into google. Yours was the first result. Thanks!