If you are using Laravel Herd Pro with a MySQL database, you may run into the “Error establishing a database connection” error.

To fix this, change your database host settings from define('DB_HOST', 'localhost'); to define('DB_HOST', '127.0.0.1'); and that should do the trick.

This can also fix errors from other software that attempts to connect using a socket (e.g., “Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/tmp/mysql.sock’”).