Configuration for using MariaDB with Laravel and El Capitan

August 29, 2016

I wanted to play around with Laravel on my mac without having to use a VM, like homestead. I decided to try out Laravel Valet, which doesn’t need a VM for setup, just brew. This however doesn’t include a db by default. I decided to use MariaDB due to its ease of use.

Installation

Since I have brew installed it’s super easy to configure:

brew install mariadb
unset TMPDIR
brew services start mariadb
mysql_install_db

Caveats:

I initially had trouble getting this to work properly, and determined it might’ve been related to not starting the service before attempting to install a db, so make sure you start the service before attempting to connect to the mariadb server.

mysql -uroot should work out without a password, if you want to secure this just run mysql_secure_installation, however in my case I don’t really need a password setup since I’m only doing work on my local machine.

Create User/Database

After I had it setup and logged in, I ran a few commands to create a database and user to access it. Since laravel includes a default config for a homestead db and user, I decided to just stick with those.

First login to the server mysql -uroot, then run these commands:

  create database homestead;
  create user 'homestead'@'localhost' identified by 'secret';
  GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON homestead.* to 'homestead'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION;

This gives the proper permissions I need to run laravel locally.