If you are getting error "Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles/var/mysql/mysql.sock' (61 "Connection refused")" when starting XAMPP on MACOS - here is the solution.

Go to terminal and go to your XAMPP installation directory

                    cd /Applications/XAMPP/xamppfiles

then login as a admin, type this in terminal

                    sudo su

and after that type in your password

 

when you are logged in as admin, start xampp by using command line:

                    ./xampp start

you will see this output:

                    Starting XAMPP for Mac OS X 7.0.9-0...
XAMPP: Starting Apache...ok.
XAMPP: Starting MySQL...ok.

And that is it, you can now go to http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ and you will see your database.