Cant login to phpmyadmin "#2002 - No such file or directory" and " Connection for controluser as defined in your configuration failed"

Question

I've tried to comment out

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['controluser'] = $dbuser;
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['controlpass'] = $dbpass;

these two lines in my config.inc.php file.

I uncommented these lines:

 $cfg['Servers'][$i]['controlhost'] = '127.0.0.1';
 $cfg['Servers'][$i]['controlport'] = '80';
 $cfg['Servers'][$i]['controluser'] = 'pma';
 $cfg['Servers'][$i]['controlpass'] = 'pmapass';

and put in 127.0.0.1 and port 80.

When I installed mysql i did mysql_secure_installation and set up a root user with all privliges (I can log into this user via commandline). So that shouldt be the problem, right?

I dont really know what to troubleshoot for. I've looked at all the other links with the same issue but none helped.

Solution

So I managed to solve it. Im not quite sure what caused the error in the first place. But I noticed that I couldnt log on to mysql via the terminal either. I got a #1698 - Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' error. So what I did was that I created a new user

 create user 'phpmyadmin'@'localhost' identified by 'mypass';

But this gave me the error: ERROR 1396 (HY000): Operation CREATE USER failed for 'phpmyadmin'@'localhost'

So I found a thread which said that we should "assume" that this user already exists. So what I did was:

mysql> drop user 'phpmyadmin'@'localhost';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0,00 sec)

mysql> flush privileges;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0,00 sec)

mysql> create user 'phpmyadmin'@'localhost' identified by 'mypass';
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0,00 sec)

mysql> grant all privileges on *.* to 'phpmyadmin'@'localhost' with grant option;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0,00 sec)

mysql> flush privileges;

After this I could log into phpmyadmin with this user.