Accessing a MySQL database through a Perl script

To access your MySQL database from your Perl scripts, you can provide the following database server name in your connection string:

localhost

For MySQL 8, the database server name is the same, but you will need to set the connection port to 3308.

Here are example connection strings for MySQL 5:

DBI->connect('DBI:mysql:localhost:database=mysql_database', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password') or die "Database connection failed";

and MySQL 8:

DBI->connect('DBI:mysql:localhost:database=mysql_database;port=3308', 'mysql_user', 'mysql_password') or die "Database connection failed";

You can find the correct database server settings for MySQL 8 for some of the most popular software applications in our MySQL 8 database server settings article.