Welcome to The Cookbook

Perhaps link the "but the CakePHP Console is Windows-compatible as well" to instructions on how to do it or split off to another section about accessing the console on a windows system.

I imagine there are a lot of CakePHP developers running development servers on their windows comps. Good instructions here: http://keyboarddance.wordpress.com/2007/10/02/setup-console-for-cakephp-for-windows/

+1

It might be worthwhile to include the steps for a *nix based console setup & a Windows setup for the console in the installation section. I would hope that people find the console tools valuable enough to want to use regardless of their platform and should be part of the installation.

This error can show up only from the command line in some installations, particularly on OSX. Essentially cake is either (1) unable to find the socket because the php installation puts mysql.sock into a nonstandard /tmp directory, or (2) not finding the socket because cake isn't finding the correct CLI (command-line interpreter) installation of php.

To fix the first sort of error for the standard OSX webserver, you need to edit the php.ini file and search for the line “mysql.default_socket = " and add "/tmp/mysql.sock" to the end of that line (and uncomment it if has a semicolon at the start)

To fix the second sort of error: If, for example, you are using xampp rather than the default Apple webserver, you need to set the shell environment variable PATH to look first for the xampp version of PHP

export PATH=/Applications/xampp/xamppfiles/bin:$PATH

You'd have to adjust the path/to/php accordingly if you are using MAMP or another nonstandard php.

If you add this line to you bash ".profile" it will change your default CLI php to this installation.