I've created a virtual machine and am installing things from scratch. Definitely not a sys admin so I'm running into some trouble. I've installed these packages and then restarted httpd

yum -y install mysql
yum -y install php-mysql
yum -y install mysql-devel
service httpd restart

The httpd restart is successful yet I am still getting this error:


I looked at /etc/my.cnf and indeed, socket is pointing to that path.

But the /var/lib/mysql folder does not even exist, nor do some files which seem crucial such as /etc/init.d/mysql. Am I missing some other important MySQL yum package? Why would some files (such as my.cnf) exist while others don't?

1 Answer 1


It's likely that you need to install the mysql-server package.

yum install mysql-server

You can search for packages by name with some of the following yum commands:

# list all packages starting with "mysql"
yum list mysql\*

# search package names/summaries/descriptions for "mysql"
yum search mysql

The packages which you did install likely provided only the client and client libraries, which you could use to connect to a mysql server located on another host.

  • 1
    That did it, thanks for explaining the difference between client/server and also showing me how to search for mysql-related packages! May 14, 2012 at 13:27
  • Same issue now I am faceing, but one thing, that I didnt know that what packages are installed in Linux server. So just I ran your command and the results are 1. List: Error: No matching Packages to list and 2. Search: Warning: No matches found for: mysql No Matches found... How can I found that where was Mysql installed on Linux machine..?
    – Pugal
    Sep 27, 2019 at 14:56

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