Opening a connection to MySQL database from PHP is easy.

Just use the mysql_connect() function

like this

<?php
$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbuser = 'root';
$dbpass = 'password';

$conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die ('Error connecting to

mysql');

$dbname = 'petstore';
mysql_select_db($dbname);
?>

$dbhost is the name of MySQL server. When your webserver is on the same machine with the
MySQL server you can use localhost or 127.0.0.1 as the value of $dbhost. The $dbuser and $dbpass
are valid MySQL user name and password. For adding a user to MySQL visit this page : MySQL
Tutorial

Don't forget to select a database using mysql_select_db() after connecting to mysql. If no database
selected your query to select or update a table will not work.

Sometimes a web host will require you to specify the MySQL server name and port number. For
example if the MySQL server name is db.php-mysql-tutorial.com and the port number is 3306 (the
default port number for MySQL) then you you can modify the above code to :

<?php
$dbhost = 'db.php-mysql-tutorial.com:3306';
$dbuser = 'root';
$dbpass = 'password';

$conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die ('Error connecting to

mysql');

$dbname = 'petstore';
mysql_select_db($dbname);
?>

It's a common practice to place the routine of opening a database connection in a separate file. Then
everytime you want to open a connection just include the file. Usually the host, user, password and
database name are also separated in a configuration file.

An example of config.php that stores the connection configuration and opendb.php that opens the
connection are :

Source code : config.phps , opendb.phps

<?php
// This is an example of config.php
$dbhost = 'localhost';
$dbuser = 'root';
$dbpass = 'password';
$dbname = 'phpcake';
?>

<?php
// This is an example opendb.php
$conn = mysql_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass) or die ('Error connecting to
mysql');
mysql_select_db($dbname);
?>

So now you can open a connection to mysql like this :

<?php
include 'config.php';
include 'opendb.php';

// ... do something like insert or select, etc

?>

Closing the Connection

The connection opened in a script will be closed as soon as the execution of the script ends. But it's
better if you close it explicitly by calling mysql_close() function. You could also put this function
call in a file named closedb.php.

Source code : closedb.phps

<?php
// an example of closedb.php
// it does nothing but closing
// a mysql database connection

mysql_close($conn);
?>

Now that you have put the database configuration, opening and closing routines in separate files
your PHP script that uses mysql would look something like this :

<?php
include 'config.php';
include 'opendb.php';

// ... do something like insert or select, etc

include 'closedb.php';
?>
Recent Comments
By: phpmsqltutor Posted on 12-02-2009 10:29 PM
The IP address. e.g. 192.168.1.5:3306

If you don't know, 3306 is the default mysql port.

By: Bright-Tutorials Posted on 12-21-2009 8:42 PM

Real awesome tutorial, between this one and the one at http://bright-tutorials.com I was able to
understand some basic php code!

By: Bright-Tutorials Posted on 12-21-2009 9:21 PM

Great tutorial. I really appreciate it. This tutorial and the ones over at http://bright-tutorials.com
really helped me with php and mysql. Thanks!

By: zeroge Posted on 01-01-2010 4:45 AM

Great tutorial and great idea ... just in my way I get an error

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Access denied for user 'me'@'here' (using

password: NO) in /home/bla/bal/balla/opendb.php on line 3

Unable to select database

Where "balla" is the password protected directory. Trying to open the directory itself by typing
simply the URL like htt://mydomain.com/balla/ I will be prompted for providing a username and
password, though the directory seems to work.

Why is it I get then this error when trying to call the page that hosts the "includes" ?

Thanks a lot

By: Ivan Posted on 05-13-2010 5:12 AM

I'm new to PHP, hope someone can give me a hand : )

I can't connect to MySQL, IE prompted me "HTTP 500" can't display the web page.

By following the instructions from a PHP-MySQL book, I did the followings:

I installed Apache 2.2.15, PHP 5.3.2, MySQL 5.1.45.

Created directory c:\Program Files\PHP\extensions, and have libmysql.dll and php_mysqli.dll saved
inside.
In c:\windows\system32, libmysql.dll was included.

In c:\Program Files\PHP\php.ini, two lines were included:

extension_dir = “c:\Program Files\PHP\extensions

extension=php_mysqli.dll

my connection.php file saved in c:\Program Files\Apache Software Foundation\Apache2.2\htdocs,

and called from localhost/connection.php

Any things else I still missed?

thanks all.

View All