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I upgraded my WordPress server to PHP 8.2 and MariaDB 10.6 and broke it; I get "cannot connect to database. I can replicate this issue on a brand new, vanilla server. Apache 2.4, PHP8.2, Maria DB 10.6, FreeBSD 13.2…as soon as I enter DB credentials into WordPress setup, I get “cannot connect to server”

I haven’t had the time yet to start working my way backwards to see which version works, but my current working setup is Apache 2.4, PHP7.4 and MariaDB 10.3

Has anyone else come across an issue like this?

3 Spice ups
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Did you by chance disable the user from connecting locally?

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The database user? I don’t think thats it, I can’t even connect as root from the site

Either user works fine from the command line

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Whole bunch of possibilities here.

  • PHP 7.4 to 8.2 is quite a jump. What about 8.1?

I don’t work with your distribution or version of *nix, so am not certain how modern or ancient it is.

  • Has your PHP 8.2 replaced the PHP 7.4 in the primary location on the server or is it installed in another location as an /opt?

  • Is your apache set up and running with php-fpm?

You didn’t mention what version of Wordpress you are working with. I’m assuming it is the current 6.3.2 or thereabouts.

I’ve worked in the CentOS 5/6/7 releases and now am doing it with Rocky Linux.

If you’ve got php-fpm in place and php 8.2 is from a place like the Remi Repository, then both of these get installed in their own alternate place in the /opt tree.

The other convention is that the service name for php-fpm gets extended with the version - php82-php-fpm.

Same idea for apache, httpd is now httpd24-httpd.

The other thing about apache and php-fpm is that PHP details you used to have in Apache phpadmin statements is now in the php-fpm configuration file. I found I had to provide tell each apache site that it was a given PHP version and that had to also be matched with php-fpm.

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IIRC 8.1 didn’t work either. I’ll stand up a new VM tonight and experiment with that version. The test I did to replicate my issue was all brand new software, no upgrades.

FreeBSD 13 is the latest; it doesn’t use /opt, but I understand what you’re getting at, I will look into it.

No PHP-FPM. Tonight I will post all of the packages I have installed

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Since php is crossing a major version boundary - 8.0 - that is the point in most software where major changes take place, so you likely have some issues due to that. Check the Upgrading and migration pages here to track down context for what isn’t working for you.

Do note also that if you’ve been working on apache 2.2 code and are now on 2.4 involves a bunch of module changes that frequently used syntax in .htaccess and any apache .conf have to be changed. service httpd configtest is your friend for that.

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I’ll check that out, thanks.

I’ve been on Apache2.4 for a little while, so no issues there. Although, maybe there’s something different I need to put in its configs with PHP8

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I figured it out…my wp-config.php file had “localhost” for the database server, once I changed that to 127.0.0.1, everything worked fine. I confirmed it on the brand new servers I stood up as well as the “broken” one I had laying around still