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

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.

problem was addressed here: stackoverflow.com/questions/45488070/… — Oladipo
– Oladipo, Commented Jan 17, 2019 at 21:04

ceejayoz · Accepted Answer · 2021-07-15 14:23:29Z

2

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.

edited Jul 15, 2021 at 14:23

answered Jan 17, 2019 at 20:50

ceejayoz

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5 Comments

ceejayoz Over a year ago

Side note: If you're going to use Postgres, you should be doing so locally too - there can be differences between the two, so you may find that some migrations don't work etc. Otherwise, there are third-party Heroku providers for MySQL databases. elements.heroku.com/addons/jawsdb elements.heroku.com/addons/jawsdb-maria or you could just spin up something like an AWS RDS instance and point your config at it.

Timothy Hayes Over a year ago

Great, thank you for the assistance, I do have one more question, there is already a pgsql entry in the database.php, should I replace it with the connection you gave me above?

ceejayoz Over a year ago

@TimothyHayes That's up to you. You could create a new connection titled something like 'heroku' instead of 'pgsql' and set DB_CONNECTION to that. Personally, I just use the one and set my local .env to have a DATABASE_URL setting that has my localhost settings in it.

Timothy Hayes Over a year ago

Cheers for all the help mate

Armin Over a year ago

Thanks, this works, here's how my .env looks like in case someone needs for reference: DATABASE_URL=postgres://homestead:[email protected]:5432/getbookmark

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