Laravel 5 with homestead having unknown database

Question

Hi I am using Laravel 5 with homestead. I am experiencing homestead first time so facing problem. I have created a database 'myDb' and imported data into this. I have installed vagrant and homestead, cloned my code and configured homestead.yaml file accordingly. I have set up my .env. When I try to run my project is is giving me unknown database myDb error. I can see my database in my phpmyadmin but I do not know why it is giving me this error. My .env file looks like

 DB_HOST=localhost
 DB_DATABASE=myDb
 DB_USERNAME=homestead
 DB_PASSWORD=secret

And I have same settings in my config/database.php too.

'mysql' => [
        'driver'    => 'mysql',
        'host'      => env('DB_HOST', 'localhost'),
        'database'  => env('DB_DATABASE', 'myDb'),
        'username'  => env('DB_USERNAME', 'homestead'),
        'password'  => env('DB_PASSWORD', 'secret'),
        'charset'   => 'utf8',
        'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
        'prefix'    => '',
        'strict'    => false,
    ]

Its really making me mad. What Am I doing wrong? I am getting following

  in Connector.php line 55
at PDO->__construct('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=myDb', 'homestead',   'secret', array('0', '2', '0', false, '0')) in Connector.php line 55
at Connector->createConnection('mysql:host=localhost;dbname=myDb', array('driver' => 'mysql', 'host' => 'localhost', 'database' => 'myDb', 'username' => 'homestead', 'password' => 'secret', 'charset' => 'utf8', 'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci', 'prefix' => '', 'strict' => false, 'name' => 'mysql'), array('0', '2', '0', false, '0')) in MySqlConnector.php line 22
 at MySqlConnector->connect(array('driver' => 'mysql', 'host' => 'localhost', 'database' => 'myDb', 'username' => 'homestead', 'password' => 'secret', 'charset' => 'utf8', 'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci', 'prefix' => '', 'strict' => false, 'name' => 'mysql')) in ConnectionFactory.php line 60
at ConnectionFactory->createSingleConnection(array('driver' => 'mysql', 'host' => 'localhost', 'database' => 'myDb', 'username' => 'homestead', 'password' => 'secret', 'charset' => 'utf8', 'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci', 'prefix' => '', 'strict' => false, 'name' => 'mysql')) in ConnectionFactory.php line 49

Answer 1

One common mistake that you might be making is that you're probably accessing MySQL server on your localhost while you should remember that Homestead is a complete virtual dev. environment. It has it's own Web Server, MySQL server and etc.

To see if you have "myDB" on the Homestead MySQL server as well, try accessing homestead via the following command.

homestead ssh

Once done that, try opening the mysql console via the mysql command.

mysql -u username -p

And after that list all your databases using

show databases

If you can't see "myDb" database there, than you should try connecting to Homestead MySQL server using Navicat or MySQL Workbench and move your database from your local MySQL server to the Homestead MySQL server.

That would probably fix your problem.