ERROR: 1045 (28000): Access denied for user 'root'@'localhost' (using password: YES)

If you keep getting the following error from MySQL when trying to connect. Here are a few things to check:

• Check that you use the hostname localhost and not 127.0.0.1 (in both cases, the error message will return localhost so this could be tricky)
• Check that your MySQL user is not using the auth_socket authentication method. If this is the case, it means that your MySQL does not in fact use a password to authenticate

To check the authentication method of each user, run the following in MySQL:

SELECT user,authentication_string,plugin,host FROM mysql.user;