PDOException SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] No such file or directory

I believe that I've successfully deployed my (very basic) site to fortrabbit, but as soon as I connect to SSH to run some commands (such as php artisan migrate or php artisan db:seed) I get an error message:

[PDOException]
SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] No such file or directory

At some point the migration must have worked, because my tables are there - but this doesn't explain why it isn't working for me now.

Solution 1:

Laravel 4: Change "host" in the app/config/database.php file from "localhost" to "127.0.0.1"

Laravel 5+: Change "DB_HOST" in the .env file from "localhost" to "127.0.0.1"

I had the exact same problem. None of the above solutions worked for me. I solved the problem by changing the "host" in the /app/config/database.php file from "localhost" to "127.0.0.1".

Not sure why "localhost" doesn't work by default but I found this answer in a similar question solved in a symfony2 post. https://stackoverflow.com/a/9251924/1231563

Update: Some people have asked as to why this fix works so I have done a little bit of research into the topic. It seems as though they use different connection types as explained in this post https://stackoverflow.com/a/9715164/1231563

The issue that arose here is that "localhost" uses a UNIX socket and can not find the database in the standard directory. However "127.0.0.1" uses TCP (Transmission Control Protocol), which essentially means it runs through the "local internet" on your computer being much more reliable than the UNIX socket in this case.

Solution 2:

The error message indicates that a MySQL connection via socket is tried (which is not supported).

In the context of Laravel (artisan), you probably want to use a different / the correct environment. Eg: php artisan migrate --env=production (or whatever environment). See here.