Rails Database Configuration on Fedora Core

A few days ago I was testing a Rails app on Fedora Core and ran into a slight problem.  You could actually call it a major problem since I was unable to talk to MySQL and instantiate any model objects.  Sometimes serious problems seem a little less serious when the fix is pretty straight-forward.  Lucky for me this was the case this time around.  When I started the application and tried to access my test controller I received the following error message:

Errno::ENOENT in TestController#index
No such file or directory – /tmp/mysql.sock

By default Rails looks for the mysql.sock in the tmp directory.  Since I used the default MySQL installation on Fedora this file was located in another directory.  I found the path to the file to be located at /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock.  I updated the database.yml config file to include the proper location:

socket: /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

and everything started running perfectly.  A somewhat simple fix for a somewhat serious problem.