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’”).
Laravel Herd is an amazing application designed to make it as easy as possible to get started with PHP development.
I have been using Homebrew to run MySQL, Redis, Meilisearch, and more, but since we recently got Herd Pro, I figured it made sense to consolidate.
Here are a few other articles on how to migrate databases to Herd Pro:
mysqldumpMy method is a combination of the two: copy the data files from the Homebrew MySQL to Herd Pro to save the time that it would take to dump and import.
Note: this only works if your homebrew MySQL and Herd Pro MySQL are on the same minor version (8.0.1 to 8.0.3 would work; 8.0.x to 8.4.x would not).
brew services stop mysql (or maybe [email protected] if you’ve updated in the past few months)open $(brew --prefix)/var/mysql to open the directory in Finderbrew uninstall [email protected]I had the privilege of going to Laracon this past week and thoroughly enjoyed both the talks and hanging out with people I previously knew only online.
There are enough other articles about the announcements, so I won’t really recap them too much, but wanted to note some of my thoughts and reactions for each.
Overall, I loved the chance to hang out with and meet other Laravel developers. I got to meet several friends that I only knew online, and got to meet a bunch of new people as well.
Jess Archer taught attendees about analytical databases and how they compare to other more traditional databases.
I think this is the talk that taught me the most of the entire conference.
Her preference is Clickhouse; it’s free and open-source, and has excellent documentation and performance.
OLTP databases tend to be row-oriented and store data on disk with each row’s index.
OLAP databases tend to be column-oriented, and store each column of data together, making it much more performant to run queries like AVERAGE(), SUM(), etc., as it only has to open a single file instead of reading the entire database like an OLTP database would.
She had downloaded a dump (22GB compressed) of all Stack Overflow posts and imported it into a MySQL database and a Clickhouse database to run queries live on stage.
It could take 5–6 seconds to load an average view count using MySQL, and 27.5ms using Clickhouse.
At least for Clickhouse, the ID field is not unique, meaning that you could have multiple rows with the same ID, and that selecting a row by ID requires a full table scan (using LIMIT 1 can help by “bailing out” once a match has been found).
Ordering: the table structure should be designed close to what the typical query needs, to prevent extra reads from disk.
Inserts: bulk inserts are optimal, rather than single-row inserts
async_insert feature can also helpUpdates: ideally, data is immutable so the engine doesn’t have to rewrite an entire file on disk
Deletes: can be optimized and automated; there’s a marker that indicates a row has been deleted, and at some point the engine will compact the files and remove those
The LowCardinality field: similar to an enum, but better; it creates a dictionary of values.
The ReplacingMergeTree engine: inserting and updating an entry results in two entries on disk until the engine compacts the files; this engine provides a final keyword that resolves this automatically during queries.
Clickhouse can also easily fill gaps in time series data, while this would be more complicated using other database engines.
She mentioned these packages for using ClickHouse in a Laravel application:
A week later, I’m still thinking about this talk and how we could use Clickhouse to provide better features and performance for some of our clients.
Joe Dixon explained how Laravel Reverb works using websockets to broadcast data to clients. It is very performant; he said that Laravel has just a single server handling thousands of connections for Forge and other products, including the upcoming Laravel Cloud.
The he provided an impressive demo: he showed a Nintendo Switch that he designed using TailwindCSS, and proceeded to fly a drone using Laravel Reverb to control it.
As if that weren’t enough, he showed how he could receive live telemetry data back from the drone (speed, altitude, temperature, and battery level) and display it on-screen. And then he turned on the camera, showing a live view of the audience!
I’ve been itching to try Reverb, and I have a couple of immediate uses for it…I just haven’t had the time yet!
Kapehe Sevilleja gave an inspiring talk showing a timeline and contrasts between her story and the history of Laravel and the community.
After a number of bad experiences at work, she enrolled in a coding bootcamp and later started working at Sanity.io. Her husband started using Laravel again and introduced her to it and the community.
Kapehe explained how she felt so welcomed by people in the Laravel community, and challenged us to think about how we can “build a good village” and “grow another’s flame” by creating an atmosphere of friendliness and belonging.
It is definitely worth watching when released. I think this was one of my favorite talks of the conference.
Freek highlighted a number of lesser-known Spatie (pronounced spa-sea) packages:
Seb Armand told some battle stories of how they have approached scaling Laravel at Square, one of the largest payment processors.
Caleb’s talk began with an unfortunate 30-minute delay caused by technical difficulties. He and Aaron Francis spent a bit of time entertaining the audience, and then Caleb took questions and answers from the audience until the equipment was ready.
He announced Flux, the official Livewire component library.
Under the hood, it uses a lot of web components, and everything he showed looked very well-designed and thought out.
I’m slightly hesitant to jump in and start using it, because I just recently spent not-insignificant time replacing another form component library that is no longer supported.
Because Caleb is charging money for this, I suspect it will remain a viable business and be supported longer than the open-source one I had used, but I still can’t bring myself to be as gung-ho about it as I’d like to be.
Taylor’s keynote is always the highlight of the conference, and this year was no exception.
Here’s the video; below are a few of the highlights and what I like about them.
Coming later this fall is a new VS Code Extension developed and maintained by Laravel.
It will offer autocomplete for a number of features (config and env values, app services, translations, views, Inertia props, and Eloquent), along with click-through links and preview-on-hover.
Probably my favorite feature is the Test Explorer integration: whether you’re using PHPUnit or Pest, your tests will show up in the sidebar, where you can run and see the status; you can also see test failure details in a “peek” UI widget.
This sounds like it will replace several of the extensions I currently use, and I’m excited to have first-party support for Laravel development in VS Code.
A Container Attributes feature feels like dependency injection for config values or other attributes. This doesn’t seem like a huge feature, but will reduce some boilerplate code.
The just-released ->chaperone() method helps prevent n+1 queries when you need to do something like retrieve authors with their posts and then access something on the author model for each post.
I know I’ve run into this before, doing something like this to prevent the n+1 queries: $authors->with('posts.author');
defer() helper and Cache::flexible()This looks very promising. It’s a simple way to push some work to the background, running it after the server has responded to the incoming request. I can immediately think of several apps where I have a super-simple job just to run something asynchronously after a request, and this can replace those.
Some potential use cases are for sending analytics, notifying third-party services, or any other “fire-and-forget” interaction.
This also enables a new Cache::flexible() method, providing a stale-while-revalidate mechanism to reduce the number of requests that hit a cold cache.
You provide two TTL numbers to this method:
I’m very excited for this, as it will help improve several pain points in a couple of current applications.
If some code needs to run multiple slow processes that don’t depend on each other, the new Concurrency facade will be helpful.
Concurrency::run([]) can be used to run multiple requests/jobs/etc. in parallel, returning the values for subsequent use; or Concurrency::defer([]) can run multiple processes in parallel after the current request, using the new defer() helper.
Most of my apps are Livewire, but these features look amazing and I’ll definitely be using them:
The big announcement: Laravel Cloud is a fully-managed infrastructure platform built specifically for hosting Laravel apps as simply as possible.
Taylor demonstrated the process of adding a new application, providing a repository, and deploying, all within 25 seconds!
It provides scalability both up and down; when not in use, it can be set to hibernate to save costs.
It allows you to create deployments from different branches, enabling an easy way to preview code in different branches before going live. (This is maybe my favorite feature.)
In the talk, he mentioned PostgreSQL as a serverless database option; later in a podcast interview with Matt Stauffer, he mentioned that MySQL is in the works for launch, but wasn’t quite complete in time for the talk.
Laravel Cloud will support creating multiple worker instances (separate from web instances) for handling queues.
It will provide SSL certificates and firewall using Cloudflare. He didn’t mention it in the talk, but in the podcast he did mention that Laravel Cloud runs on AWS, and another conference attendee said that Taylor told him it used Kubernetes.
For sandbox:
For production:
Observability and debugging: wait until Laracon Australia!
Overall, Laravel Cloud seems like it dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for new developers, side projects, or anyone or any project that just wants to get something up and running with a low barrier to entry. I’m excited to see how this is going to change the ecosystem, as it makes it easier for people to focus on just building and shipping software.