I cannot access local database on terminal (MAC)
It could be your admin user is connecting from admin@127.0.0.1.

Assuming admin is the actual user you have privileges on, try connecting through:

&gt; mysql -h 127.0.0.1 -u admin -p


The way MySQL handles users, the host is very important, and in this case 127.0.0.1 is different than localhost.

If your phpMyAdmin user has access to the mysql database, you can the following statement to see what user/host combinations exist on your install.

 SELECT User, Host FROM mysql.user