Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/mysql/mysql.sock’ (38)

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.