How do I make my Laravel project on Heroku use Heroku Postgres? - php

Question

I have been working on a project that requires I set it up in Heroku. The Database I have been using thus far locally is mySQL, but I am looking to use Postgre when the project is on Heroku.
I have done a large amount of searching but have yet to find an answer as to how I configure my Laravel project to use Postgres and how do I perform basic functions such as adding a new database to Postgres.
If there is an alternative way to just use mySQL as is that would be great.
Thanks for the help.

Answer 1

Heroku places (once you provision a Heroku Postgres instance) the database credentials in the DATABASE_URL environment variable, in the following format:
postgres://username:password#hostname:port/database
Now, you could manually fill out your DB_HOST, DB_USERNAME, etc. .env vars from this, but there's a better way: you can parse the URL in your config/database.php file.
Note: Newer versions of Laravel now support a DATABASE_URL .env value directly. No need to parse anymore.
'pgsql' => [
'driver' => 'pgsql',
'host' => parse_url(env('DATABASE_URL'), PHP_URL_HOST),
'port' => parse_url(env('DATABASE_URL'), PHP_URL_PORT),
'database' => ltrim(parse_url(env('DATABASE_URL'), PHP_URL_PATH), '/'),
'username' => parse_url(env('DATABASE_URL'), PHP_URL_USER),
'password' => parse_url(env('DATABASE_URL'), PHP_URL_PASS),
'charset' => 'utf8',
'prefix' => '',
'schema' => 'public',
'sslmode' => 'prefer',
],
(Make sure you set DB_CONNECTION to pgsql so this connection is used!)
how do I perform basic functions such as adding a new database to Postgres
You don't. A Heroku Postgres instance comes with one database.