Connecting to AWS RDS via PDO - php

Question

I have been trying to connect my PHP application to a MySQL database on AWS RDS via PDO. I have seen a similar question here: Unable to connect to AWS RDS through PDO but this is over 4 years old with no definitive answers.
I have tried this a couple of ways. Firstly, passing the host name as '<my-db-name.eu-west-2.rds.amazonaws.com:3306' and secondly passing the port explicitly in the dsn string via
$dsn = $dsn = "mysql:host=" . $this->host . ";port=". $this->port . ";dbname=" . $this->name . ";charset=utf8";
(commented out below). Neither works!
The code snippet is:
$dsn = null;
$options = null;
$this->host = SYSTEM_CONFIG["database"]["host"];
$this->type = SYSTEM_CONFIG["database"]["type"];
$this->name = SYSTEM_CONFIG["database"]["name"];
$this->user = SYSTEM_CONFIG["database"]["user"];
$this->pass = SYSTEM_CONFIG["database"]["pass"];
/* New */
$this->port = SYSTEM_CONFIG["database"]["port"];
switch ($this->type) {
case "SQLSRV":
$dsn = "sqlsrv:Server=" . $this->host . ";Database=" . $this->name;
$options = [
PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT => false,
PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE => PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION,
PDO::SQLSRV_ATTR_FETCHES_NUMERIC_TYPE => true,
PDO::ATTR_STRINGIFY_FETCHES => false
];
break;
default:
$dsn = "mysql:host=" . $this->host . ";dbname=" . $this->name;
//$dsn = "mysql:host=" . $this->host . ";port=". $this->port . ";dbname=" . $this->name . ";charset=utf8";
$options = [
PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT => false,
PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE => PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION,
PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES => false,
PDO::ATTR_STRINGIFY_FETCHES => false
];
}
try {
$this->pdo = new PDO($dsn, $this->user, $this->pass, $options);
} catch (PDOException $e) {
$this->logError($e);
} catch (Exception $e) {
$this->logError($e);
}
One thing that does work is to pass the IP address and port as the host name in the form
$this->host = "<IP-address>:3306"
However, I only found the IP address by pinging the host name and I am not sure if this is static or a dynamic IP address (the latter would be no good in a config file!).
Any help on this would be much appreciated!

Answer 1

Have got the code working now, although quite frustratingly I never got to the bottom of why it wasn't working in the first place! I suspect it was something to do with not picking up on the port number properly - maybe a typo somewhere that got 'accidently' corrected (rather than deliberately) when I was trying things out. This code now works (just for MySQL):
$dsn = null;
$options = null;
$this->host = SYSTEM_CONFIG["database"]["host"];
$this->type = SYSTEM_CONFIG["database"]["type"];
$this->name = SYSTEM_CONFIG["database"]["name"];
$this->user = SYSTEM_CONFIG["database"]["user"];
$this->pass = SYSTEM_CONFIG["database"]["pass"];
$this->port = SYSTEM_CONFIG["database"]["port"];
switch ($this->type) {
case "SQLSRV":
// Other untested code...
break;
default:
$dsn = "mysql:host={$this->host};port={$this->port};dbname={$this->name};charset=utf8";
$options = [
PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT => false,
PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE => PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION,
PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES => false,
PDO::ATTR_STRINGIFY_FETCHES => false
];
}
try {
$this->pdo = new PDO($dsn, $this->user, $this->pass, $options);
} catch (PDOException $e) {
$this->logError($e);
} catch (Exception $e) {
$this->logError($e);
}