Issues establishing connection to a database due to a blank password

I had a task of creating some general front end updates for a wordpress site.

A simple task of setting up the site locally caused headache I was unable to connect to the database. Initially I thought this was a wordpress issue, then a mysql.sock issue. I checked with a laravel app I had locally and the issue occured there too.

The issue was caused as when using dbengin to manage my databases, the default user created for each database has a blank password. This wasn’t accepted for both laravel & wordpress.

The solution was to set one using the following:

ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'password';

This solved the issue of establishing connection to the wordpress site (and a laravel app I used to test the connection).