Cannot connect to the mysql RDS instance on AWS

Question

I created a MySQL RDS instance on AWS. I also created an EC2 instance on which I installed Wordpress, Apache, MySQL client, and other dependencies using the script shown below.

-- Script

#!/bin/bash

yum update -y

yum install httpd php php-mysql -y

cd /var/www/html

echo "healthy" > healthcheck.html

wget https://wordpress.org/wordpress-5.1.1.tar.gz

tar -xzf wordpress-5.1.1.tar.gz

cp -r wordpress/* /var/www/html/

rm -rf wordpress

rm -rf wordpress-5.1.1.tar.gz

chmod -R 755 wp-content

chown -R apache:apache wp-content

chkconfig httpd on

service httpd start

I created a database and a master user while creating an RDS instance, and tried to host a Wordpress website. It shows this error every time ( This either means that the username and password information in your wp-config.php file is incorrect or we can't contact the database server at wpsdbserver.cv3al69dy8rq.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com. This could mean your host's database server is down ).

Both EC2 instance and RDS instance are in the same VPC, and also I have allowed port 3306 from SecurityGroup1(Ec2) to SecurityGroup2(Rds instance). I have entered the correct username, password, and database endpoint. RDS instance has no public access. The rest of the configuration settings are set to default.

Answer 1

Based on the comments.

The issue was caused by the use of MySQL 8 . MySQL introduced some changes that causes wordpress not to work out of the box. It has been reported several times before along with potential fixes, eg here , here or here .

The easiest way to overcome this issue is to use MySQL 5.7 which works out of the box with Wordpress.