Updated: Doctrine and MySQL 8 - An Odd Connection Refused Error

I am currently working my way through the many PHP Frameworks to see how they get on with MySQL 8.  The Frameworks that can take advantage of the MySQL Improved Extension or mysqli can take advantage of the SHA256 Caching Authentication method. But those that are PDO based need to use the older MySQL Native Authentication method.

I wanted to check the PDO based frameworks and today I just happened to be wearing the very nice Symfony shirt I received as part of my presentation at Symfony USA.  So I started with a fresh install of Symfony.  All was going well until it came time to get it to work with MySQL 8 through Doctrine.

Doctrine

Symfony uses Doctrine as an ORM (Object Relational Mapper) and DBAL  (Database Abstraction Layer) as an intermediary to the database.  While I myself am not a big fan of ORMs Doctrine does manage version migration very nicely.  When I tried to tie the frame work and the database together I received a stern connection refused error.

So I double checked the database connection parameters, making sure that I could get to where I wanted using the old MySQL shell.  Yes, the account to be used is identified by the native passwords and I had spelled the account name correctly. Then I double checked for fat-fingering on my part on the .env file where the connection details are stored. Then I did some searching and found someone else had stumbled onto the answer.

What does not work:
DATABASE_URL=mysql://account:password@127.0.0.1:3306/databasename

What does work:
DATABASE_URL=mysql://account:password@localhost:3306/databasename

So a simple s/127.0.0.1/hostname/ got things going.  I double checked the /etc/hosts file to make sure that alias was there (it was).


From then on I was able to create a table with VARCHAR and JSON columns and go about my merry way.

Update: An Oracle MySQL Engineer who works with the PHP connectors informed me that libmysql and all derived clients interpret "localhost" to mean "don't use TCP/ip, but Unix domain socket". And there was a kind post on the Doctrine mailing list informing me that the problems was upstream from Doctrine. Thanks to all who responded to solve this mystery for me.