Laravel 5.6 MySQL Server has gone away

This worked for me. I used the following command to update my password with new authentication plugin. You can use MySQL 8 now. Have fun.

ALTER USER `username`@`localhost` IDENTIFIED WITH caching_sha2_password BY 'password';

If above doesn't work use this instead.

ALTER USER 'username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'password';

Got this sorted out! Woohoo! Thank you again to everyone for all of the advice, I really appreciated the assistance.

How I Resolved:

Digging deeper into this, I noticed that I had 2 versions of MySQL installed - 5.7 & 8.0.

• I uninstalled [email protected] via homebrew
  • brew uninstall [email protected]
• Linked the correct version
  • brew link [email protected]
• I updated my $PATH
  • sudo nano ~/.bash_profile
  • And added the following line in place of the 5.7:
  • export PATH="/usr/local/opt/[email protected]/bin:$PATH"
• I followed @poohbear 's answer here about altering the mysql user
• Then, I truncated the user table on the Laravel database from the mysql prompt
  • mysql -u root -p
  • mysql> USE digitalchef;
  • mysql> TRUNCATE TABLE users;

I don't know if it accomplished anything after the fact, but I made sure to run a php artisan config:cache afterwards, just for good measure.

Hopefully this helps someone out who is struggling with this! Thank you all again for the support, and @poohbear deserves mad credit for his answer.