Artisan commands not working in fresh Laravel installation

I just created a new Laravel app and installed Jetstream, and when I went to run php artisan serve it hung and didn’t do anything.

Then, I tried to run php artisan migrate, and it also stalled for a while before giving me an error that the database connection had timed out.

This was weird, because it was a completely fresh installation of Laravel and Jetstream with no changes made.

I eventually realized that the issue lay in the .env file. The new Laravel installation has a .env file with these values:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql
# DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_HOST=mysql
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=laravel
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=

The DB_HOST variable is no longer set to localhost, like it used to be, but my local MySQL database for development is running at localhost:3306 (which is the same as 127.0.0.1:3306).

To fix it, all I had to do was uncomment the first DB_HOST line by removing the #, and then remove the line that says DB_HOST=mysql.

Then, php artisan serve and php artisan migrate worked perfectly again.