Laravel 5.1 - Checking a Database Connection

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.

1. If database 1 is connected, save data to it
2. If database 1 is not connected, check if database 2 is connected
3. If database 2 is connected save data to it
4. If database 2 is not connected, check if database 3 is connected
5. 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?

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 );
}

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.

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.");
    }

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.

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.

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.