Using PlanetScale with Laravel

PlanetScale is a neat MySQL-compatible serverless database that seems to work really nicely with Laravel.

Here are a few things I ran in to while setting up a recent project.

.env

The MYSQL_ATTR_SSL_CA .env variable in the connection instructions for a Laravel app work well on my local machine running Valet.

To get it working on a Forge-provisioned production server, I used:

MYSQL_ATTR_SSL_CA=/etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt

Promoting to Production

When attempting to promote my PlanetScale branch database to production, I ran into this:

Table “password_resets” has no unique key: all tables must have at least one unique, not-null key.

Since this is a new project, I just updated my password_resets migration by adding $table->id();

Schema::create('password_resets', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->id();
    $table->string('email')->index();
    $table->string('token');
    $table->timestamp('created_at')->nullable();
});

The workflow

Make sure you understand the concepts of the PlanetScale workflow. Also review the Laravel-specific stuff - it's super helpful.

Do not run migrations on your production server

Just to recap, you can still use Laravel migrations to modify your schema, but you should only run them on your application's dev environment. Your dev environment will be connected to your PlanetScale development branch, so the migrations will run on your PlanetScale development database and can be safely merged into production when ready.

Do not run them on your production server. Your production server is connected to your main production PlanetScale database, so PlanetScale is already handling it for you when you deploy your PS dev branch to production.

via (https://planetscale.com/blog/zero-downtime-laravel-migrations)[https://planetscale.com/blog/zero-downtime-laravel-migrations]

On Forge, I removed this in my deploy script:

if [ -f artisan ]; then
    $FORGE_PHP artisan migrate --force
fi