Mysql – Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/thesql.sock’ (2)

Check the bind-address in your my.cnf. It should be 0.0.0.0 in order to allow both local and remote connections.

Check with ps xa | grep mysql how many instances are run.

Edit
Apparanently:

A MySQL client on Unix can connect to the mysqld server in two different ways: By using a Unix socket file to connect through a file in the file system (default /tmp/mysql.sock), or by using TCP/IP, which connects through a port number. A Unix socket file connection is faster than TCP/IP, but can be used only when connecting to a server on the same computer. A Unix socket file is used if you don't specify a host name or if you specify the special host name localhost.

Check here for some useful tip.

Edit2
One of possible reasons of Can't connect to local MySQL server, that seems to be the problem here:

Someone has removed the Unix socket file that mysqld uses (/tmp/mysql.sock by default). For example, you might have a cron job that removes old files from the /tmp directory. You can always run mysqladmin version to check whether the Unix socket file that mysqladmin is trying to use really exists. The fix in this case is to change the cron job to not remove mysql.sock or to place the socket file somewhere else. See Section B.5.4.5, “How to Protect or Change the MySQL Unix Socket File”.

Martin, make sure you have socket = /var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock in my.cnf, I believe mysqld restart will solve your problem, it should recreate mysqld.sock and you should be able to connect locally.

If your file my.cnf (usually in the /etc/mysql/ folder) is correctly configured with

socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock

you can check if mysql is running with the following command:

mysqladmin -u root -p status

try changing your permission to mysql folder. If you are working locally, you can try:

sudo chmod -R 755 /var/lib/mysql/

that solved it for me