I'm a total drupal noob, but a long-time CGI/Web/database programmer. When I installed drupal, the first things I wanted to do was to understand drupal in terms of the file structure and also to access the drupal MySQL database independent of drupal itself - I.E. - from either bash via mysql client or via an API. I use python.MySQLdb in this example. The installation of drupal by acquia and the bitnami stack on Mac OSX puts the data storage at a different location than the default mysql installation. So to use the MySQL client one has to use the -S option to pass the drupal socket file and the -P option to pass the port number. mysql -hlocalhost -uroot -p****** -P3307 -S/Applications/drupal-7.15-0/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock ## NOTE: /Applications/drupal-7.15-0/mysql/tmp/mysql.sock is the socket file and the drupal instance of the mysql client listens at port 3307. Two different API connections (using the mysql shared object approach) and the python MySQLdb API first, load the MySQLdb API source import MySQLdb ## 1)Using root as user conn = MySQLdb.connect(db='bitnami_drupal7',host='localhost',user='root', passwd='rootpassword',read_default_file="/Applications/drupal-7.15-0/mysql/my.cnf") ## 2)Using the bitnami user created in the installation and from the ## $databases array in sites/default/settings.php conn=MySQLdb.connect(db='bitnami_drupal7',host = 'localhost', user='bitnami',passwd='bitnamipassword', read_default_file="/Applications/drupal-7.15-0/mysql/my.cnf") Note that in both cases we pass the 'read_default_file' keyword with the value of the drupal mysql option file : /Applications/drupal-7.15-0/mysql/my.cnf But the `passwd' value will be different for the different users. :) And use user 'root' at yer own peril. Getting this together was some work for me and perhaps this as archived might save someone else some time. Any comments or corrections by the wise heads on this list are invited. cheers -- Tim tim at tee jay forty nine dot com or akwebsoft dot com http://www.akwebsoft.com