Laravel 5.4 on PHP 7.0: PDO Exception - Could not find driver (MySQL)

Question

I have a Laravel 5.4 project on my Ubuntu 14.04 (VPS with Plesk 12.5.30). After creating the database and setted up the .env file with required information I ran php artisan migrate and exceptions were thrown:

[Illuminate\Database\QueryException]
could not find driver (SQL: select * from information_schema.tables where table_schema = pmaramaldb and table_name = migrations)

[PDOException]
could not find driver

My .env file has:

DB_CONNECTION=mysql

DB_HOST=127.0.0.1

DB_PORT=3306

DB_DATABASE=pmaramaldb

DB_USERNAME=user

DB_PASSWORD=password

I've followed most of the guides to solve this error and there wasn't any positive results:

Enabling Extension Solution:

PDO is enabled

The php.ini file is being generated automatically, I guess this is made by Plesk. At the start of the file it says:

; ATTENTION!
;
; DO NOT MODIFY THIS FILE BECAUSE IT WAS GENERATED AUTOMATICALLY,
; SO ALL YOUR CHANGES WILL BE LOST THE NEXT TIME THE FILE IS GENERATED.

So I've tried it anyway. After that I've restarted Apache and then tried again... Didn't work.

Installing php7.0-mysql Solution:

I've also tried to install MySQL in case is not:

user@server:/var/www/vhosts$ sudo apt-get install php7.0-mysql

Leyendo lista de paquetes... Hecho

Creando árbol de dependencias

Leyendo la información de estado... Hecho

php7.0-mysql is already the newest version.

0 actualizados, 0 se instalarán, 0 para eliminar y 67 no actualizados.

** SQL Lite Install Solution:**

I've also tried as question link says: sudo apt-get install php5-sqlite and the result was:

user@server:/var/www/vhosts/system/maramal.io/etc$ sudo apt-get install php5-sqlite

Leyendo lista de paquetes... Hecho

Creando árbol de dependencias

Leyendo la información de estado... Hecho

php5-sqlite is already the newest version.

0 actualizados, 0 se instalarán, 0 para eliminar y 67 no actualizados.

Composer Dump-autoload Solution:

It didn't work either. I've tried composer dump-autoload and it didn't work.

After ran the command php -i:

PDO

PDO support => enabled

PDO drivers =>

...

PHP Version => 5.6.30-1+deb.sury.org~trusty+1

Well, I am not sure if this has anything to do with the error, but the version shown by running php -v is:

user@server: ~/path$ php -v

PHP 5.6.30-1+deb.sury.org~trusty+1 (cli)

Copyright (c) 1997-2016 The PHP Group

Zend Engine v2.6.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2016 Zend Technologies
with Zend OPcache v7.0.6-dev, Copyright (c) 1999-2016, by Zend Technologies

Answer 1

As an alternative solution be sure you have installed php7-mysql

try to run command below

sudo apt install php7.0-mysql 

or, if you want to automatically install the current version

sudo apt install php-mysql 

Answer 2

Same problem, ubuntu 17.10, Laravel 5.5.

$ sudo apt install php7.1-pdo php7.1-mysql

A nice quick fix, hope this helps