title: Editing localhost website with remote MySQL
body: <p>a two week server n00B here.  </p>
  
  <p>I want to edit my website on my local machine.  I'm doing this cos I can't afford programmers at the moment... they have done everything up until now.</p>
  
  <p>I have downloaded the /var/www/ directory to my local machine and I am trying to view the site through localhost on my Mac.</p>
  
  <p>When I do I get the message:</p>
  
  <pre><code>Database connection error (2): Could not connect to MySQL.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Do I need to have the var/lib/mysql/ directory locally for the site to run?  Am I going the right way about this?</p>
  
  <p>Additionally I haven't permission to the mysql directory on the server, the user is "mysql".  I don't know how to change this as I can't connect to the ubuntu AWS server through Mindterm... but that's another story.</p>