Ubuntu – My MySQL installation is broken. How to completely reconfigure it

MySQL

Here are the following commands I have done.

$ sudo service mysql start
mysql start/running

$ mysql -u root
ERROR 2002 (HY000): Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2)

$ aptitude search mysql |grep ^i
i   libapache2-mod-auth-mysql       - Module Apache 2 pour l'authentification vi
i   libdbd-mysql-perl               - Perl5 database interface to the MySQL data
i   libmysqlclient16                - MySQL database client library             
i   mysql-client-5.1                - MySQL database client binaries            
i   mysql-client-core-5.1           - MySQL database core client binaries       
i   mysql-common                    - MySQL database common files, e.g. /etc/mys
i   mysql-server-5.1                - MySQL database server binaries and system 
i   mysql-server-core-5.1           - MySQL database server binaries            
i   php5-mysql                      - MySQL module for php5                     

Best Answer

Before reinstalling check /var/log/mysql for logs files which may contain clues as to why mysql is not working. If there are no logs log to file might not be enabled in your configuration: Configure Mysql Error Log

To reinstall any package check installed version with

dpkg -l|grep mysql-server

then for version 5.7 use

sudo apt-get install mysql-server-5.7 --reinstall

If this doesn't allow you to reconfigure the package you can use

sudo dpkg-reconfigure mysql-server-5.7
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