If you use MAMP like me for local PHP development on OS X it’s great most of the time. Except when it decides to run with this annoying bug on startup up again after first quitting the application once.

If you get the “Error: Could not connect to MySQL server!” notice, here is the solution:

  1. Quit MAMP
  2. Open the terminal and type: killall -9 mysqld
  3. Restart MAMP

Voila!