Creating a connection between PHP and MySQL is fairly simple. PHP provides all of the functions you need to connect and extract data.
Before we begin have a database setup in MySQL and know the username, password and name of the database.
Create a table and add some default values into it. Remember the name of this table.
1) To connect to MySQL you really only need a few variables. To start, open notepad and add these lines:
PHP Code:
<?php
// mysql config
$mysql_username = "yourname";
$mysql_password = "password";
$mysql_database = "db";
$mysql_server = "localhost";
These are the values that we will use to connect to MySQL from PHP. Replace all of these values with your MySQL values. $mysql_server = "localhost" can generally be as is.
2) Now we will connect to MySQL using the variables above:
PHP Code:
$link = mysql_connect($mysql_server, $mysql_username, $mysql_password);
mysql_select_db($mysql_database, $link);
As simple as that you have a connection to MySQL.
3) Lets pull some data out of our DB. You should have the table name as stated above and I named mine tbl_tutorial so replace this with your table name. We now need to build a query
PHP Code:
$query = "SELECT * FROM tbl_tutorial";
4) Execute the query
PHP Code:
$results = mysql_query($query, $link);
This will actually make the query on the MySQL database. Once this has been done all we need to do is fetch the results and manipulate them.
5) Display our results
PHP Code:
// Fetch results
while ($row = mysql_fetch_row($results)) {
// Data will be displayed in an array $row[0]
print "$row[0]<br>";
}
The $row array will contain all of the fields in your table starting with 0 and ending with the number of rows - 1.
6) Close our connection
PHP Code:
// Close our connection
mysql_close($link);
?>
Thats it. I've attached the PHP file from this tutorial if you need to reference it.