Laravel 5.1 - Checking a Database Connection - php

Question

I am trying to check if a database is connected in Laravel.
I've looked around the documentation and can't find anything. The closest thing I've found is this, but this doesn't solve my problem.
I have three instances of MySQL that are set up on different machines. Below is a simplified version of what I am trying to achieve.
If database 1 is connected, save data to it
If database 1 is not connected, check if database 2 is connected
If database 2 is connected save data to it
If database 2 is not connected, check if database 3 is connected
If database 3 is connected, save data to it
To be clear, is there a way to check that a database is connected in Laravel 5.1?

Answer 1

Try just getting the underlying PDO instance. If that fails, then Laravel was unable to connect to the database!
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;
// Test database connection
try {
DB::connection()->getPdo();
} catch (\Exception $e) {
die("Could not connect to the database. Please check your configuration. error:" . $e );
}

Answer 2

You can use alexw's solution with the Artisan. Run following commands in the command line.
php artisan tinker
DB::connection()->getPdo();
If connection is OK, you should see
CONNECTION_STATUS: "Connection OK; waiting to send.",
near the end of the response.

Answer 3

You can use this, in a controller method or in an inline function of a route:
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;
//....
try {
DB::connection()->getPdo();
if(DB::connection()->getDatabaseName()){
echo "Yes! Successfully connected to the DB: " . DB::connection()->getDatabaseName();
}else{
die("Could not find the database. Please check your configuration.");
}
} catch (\Exception $e) {
die("Could not open connection to database server. Please check your configuration.");
}

Answer 4

You can also run this:
php artisan migrate:status
It makes a db connection connection to get migrations from migrations table. It'll throw an exception if the connection fails.

Answer 5

You can use this query for checking database connection in laravel:
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;
// ...
$pdo = DB::connection()->getPdo();
if($pdo)
{
echo "Connected successfully to database ".DB::connection()->getDatabaseName();
} else {
echo "You are not connected to database";
}
For more information, you can check out this page https://laravel.com/docs/5.0/database.

Answer 6

I don't know if this worked in that version of laravel, but at least on newer ones you can run
php artisan db
and if your app can access the database then you should see a cli repl for it, for postgres you will see a psql instance

Answer 7

Another Approach:
When Laravel tries to connect to database, if the connection fails or if it finds any errors it will return a PDOException error. We can catch this error and redirect the action
Add the following code in the app/filtes.php file.
App::error(function(PDOException $exception)
{
Log::error("Error connecting to database: ".$exception->getMessage());
return "Error connecting to database";
});
Hope this is helpful.