[PHP] PHP Connecting to Mysql

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Opening a connection to MySQL database from PHP is easy. Just use the mysql_connect() function like this

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$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.

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 :

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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 :

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

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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.

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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 :

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