Let's talk a little bit about configuration in environments.

One of the things inside of Laravel is it has the ability to do multiple

environments such as, in our case local or

production development testing, so on and so forth.

What we're doing now is currently working in the local environment.

There are two ways to test this.

One is that when we initially set up our homestead.

We had a default that said our environment was local.

We can actual switch over to our Vagrant box, so you have to Vagrant SSH.

And then go to your sites laravel-basics folder.

What you're going to do is type in

an artisan command, php artisan, and then, env.

And what that's going to do is

tell you what your current application environment is.

Why that mattered to us right now is as we're setting up our database

the local database config is usually different

than the say, the production database configuration.

So if you look in your config folder, you'll notice that there is a

subfolder called local, a subfolder called testing, and a subfolder called packages.

We're going to concern now with, local.

You'll see there is a local app which tells us that we have debug equal to true.

We also have a database which gives us our database configuration for our local.

Now notice the difference here is that inside database for

the production environment, you'll see default is set to MySQL.

Here it's not.

So, because it's not set, it means

that it inherits initially from this database file.

So what we want to do is change our MySQL settings for local.

So we'll say driver is MySQL.

The local host is fine.

But our database is not homestead.

Our database will actually be odot.

Now our user name will be homestead and our password will be secret.

So now all we have to do is save this file.

Let's switch back over to our routes and show what database we're currently using.

So head to your routes file.

And now I'm going to paste in a route with a closure.

A very simple route to get /db.

Just as a temporary URL.

And then we're going to do a return DB select.

So this is just running a method on the

db class which is an internal Laravel db class.

And then we're saying we wanna do a select database statement.

Which is just going to give us our current database.

Let's run that now.

So here we have laravel.div/8000, which is going to give us our main link, main list.

Now we're gonna do /db, hit enter and it

will show us that our current database is odot.

This let's us know a couple of things.

One, we are connecting to our database, so if

we were, for instance, to modify our configuration here.

Two, mess this up so let's say our database is foo, and

then go back and refresh, we're gonna end up getting an error.

PDOException, which is unknown database foo.

So, that would be something you would get

if you were not connecting to your database.

Let's change that back to odot and then hit refresh.

And so now you see we're connecting, we're making

our route, and we're tying into the db class.

And running a select statement to find out what database we're currently on.

In this case our current database is odot, so, we're good to go