Can't connect to database even with known good credentials Topic is solved

[maestroc]

Posting here on the chance someone knows what to try. I am aware that this probably isn't a Joomla specific thing.

I have a joomla site on a cpanel server. It was an old one that was still running SQL5. I ran the updater to take SQL up to version 8 and after doing so I started getting the "Error: Failed to start application: Could not connect to MySQL server."

On the chance something got corrupted I then took a known good backup of the site and restored it using Akeeba. When I got to the DB page I entered a new db, user, and password that I had just created. At this point I once again get the Error: Failed to start application: Could not connect to MySQL server.

Any idea what could have happened to screw things up? It is like the hosting account can't see SQL even though I created the database using the account's cpanel and can see the tables of other databases in it.

[Webdongle]

Copy/pasting can often transfer hiden characters?
Try a simple PHP script to connect to the database.

[Per Yngve Berg]

Have you given the User access to the Database?

[maestroc]

The cpanel people finally figured it out but I will post here as well in case someone needs it. In the end this was the fix:

With the release of MySQL 8, the default character set was changed to utfmb4. Updating to a version of PHP newer than 7.4 tends to resolve this. Alternatively, if you need to use an older version of PHP, the fix involves modifying the /etc/my.cnf file to set the default character set to UT8.


https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us/art ... the-client