Laravel is coveted as the most popular PHP web framework in the world right now, and for good reason. It's got a lot going for it with it's vast ecosystem of Laravel Packages, great communities, and exemplary documentation - what isn't there to love?

Well, it turns out that a lot of people - myself included, more times than I'll openly admit - bump into some simple issues when using it. 99% are down to developer error, so I'm going to reel off a few of those now. We'll go into the more complex common issues in a later post, as they'll need more attention.

So what are the most common errors that people see when using Laravel for the first time? Let's take a look.

No Application Key Set

On a fresh laravel clone, you'll get a .env.example file. Now, if you've not used an installer CLI, you won't have generated your application key.

To generate an application key, simply run the following;

php artisan key:generate

From there your application will run as expected.

{table} not found

So you're on a page on your Laravel site, and you're getting a "table does not exist" or "table not found in database" error. This could be due to one of a few reasons. Here's the most common ones that you'll encounter when learning Laravel;

• You haven't run the migration(s)

  Run php artisan migrate to get your database up to date with all migrations

• There's a typo in your model

  Sometimes you set a protected $table on your model, confirm that's spelt correctly. If you haven't set one, check the name of the Model itself, as Laravel will use some magic to guess the table name

• Your database connection isn't quite right, or you're on the wrong connection

  Check the .env file settings for your DB settings

  Check if a protected $connection has been set on the Model

Specified key was too long

• This only happens in some of the older Laravel code bases, when moving to a more recent release. Specifically anything pre Laravel 5.4 moving to post-5.4

  Open your AppServiceProvider.php file, and add the following;

    use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
  
    public function boot()
    {
        Schema::defaultStringLength(191);
    }
  

• The reasoning for this is because the default charset for Laravel moved to support emojis (using the utf8mb4 database character set)

  If you're running MySQL 5.5.7 or higher, you will not find this issue as it's handled at the database level 🎉

HTTP 419 Page Expired whenever submitting a form

• 99% of the time this is due to not submitting a CSRF Token with your request. There's two ways to resolve this;

  Add the @csrf to your blade file within the <form> tags

  Add the URI to the VerifyCsrfToken middleware protected $except array, so that the route no longer requires CSRF tokens

The stream of file {{some_file}} could not be opened: failed to open stream: Permission Denied

• Good ol' Linux and it's permissions. Simple fix, but simply put your web user does not have access / permission to modify to a directory. Most likely this will be the storage/logs directory within Laravel

  sudo chmod -R 775 ./storage

• If your error is related to bootstrap (i.e. cacheing of service providers and the like), you should run this as well / instead;

  sudo chmod -R 775 ./bootstrap

Both commands should be run from the root of your project

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Summary

These are very basic and common issues that you'll face when using Laravel. Whether that's as a new user, or a seasoned veteran. We all come across these, and there's no shame in forgetting how to fix them sometimes.

Hell, I'll probably open this exact article up next week because I've forgotten to set a csrf token somewhere, or not generated an Application Key - it happens to us all.

Next post, I'm hoping to put something together surround the Laravel Community, some of it's more prominent figures and what they're known for. If you have any requests; let me know!

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