cannot migrate in new Laravel project

Question

So, I am trying to create a laravel project from scratch.
I ran the following:

composer global require "laravel/installer=~1.1" //this code was not necessary
composer create-project laravel/laravel my-project-name
php artisan serve

Now I got the new laravel project ready to go, and tried to run:

php artisan migrate

but it returned an error:

SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Connection refused

I looked around other answers to similiar questions, but none of them solved the issue.
I also tried creating a new mysql user, but it returned another error:

SQLSTATE[HY000] [1698] Access denied

My current env:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=laravel
DB_USERNAME=user
DB_PASSWORD=password

Answer 1

This problem was due to permission issues.
I could not migrate using root because Ubuntu needs sudo now, so I created a new user following the steps in option 2 of the first answer here.

One thing I had to change was that I had to run

UPDATE user SET plugin='mysql_native_password' WHERE User='YOUR_SYSTEM_USER';

instead of

UPDATE user SET plugin='auth_socket' WHERE User='YOUR_SYSTEM_USER';

Putting it all together it would be:

sudo mysql -u root

mysql> USE mysql;
mysql> CREATE USER 'YOUR_SYSTEM_USER'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'YOUR_PASSWD';
mysql> GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* TO 'YOUR_SYSTEM_USER'@'localhost';
mysql> UPDATE user SET plugin='mysql_native_password' WHERE User='YOUR_SYSTEM_USER';
mysql> FLUSH PRIVILEGES;
mysql> exit;

sudo service mysql restart