I have a little bit of a chicken and egg problem here. I am building a multitenant app in Laravel where each tenant has their own database on a Postgrsql server. So I have a job to create a new tenant that calls:

Schema::connection($this->tenant->getDatabaseConnection())->createDatabase($this->tenant->getDatabaseName())

So $this->tenant->getDatabaseConnection() chooses a tenant DB server to add the tenant to and returns the that's servers connection name. Then $this->tenant->getDatabaseName() will return the string of the DB name for that tenant.

I got one small problem. This throws an exception:

SQLSTATE[08006] [7] FATAL: database "port=5432" does not exist (SQL: create database "local_tenant_(id)" encoding "utf8")

This is because the connection by default had the DB name as null. And when a user logs into their tenant we dynamically inject getDatabaseName() from the Tenant model into that.

But I can't do that here because the tenant DB does not yet exist. So here are the options I see:

1. choose a random database of an existing tenant on the server to "act as" when creating the new tenant's DB. I don't really like having to hijack another tenant's DB even temporarily like that even though this should have 0 side affects to that tenant. And if it's the first tenant being provisioned on the server, there's no existing DB to use, which makes this a no-go in my book on it's own.

2. I could just use the DB providers API to create the tenant DB. This would be by far the simplest but would break in local and testing environments and therefore I want to avoid.

3. I could just bypass Laravel and establish a direct PDO connection to the database for this, but I would say that's my last resort if I can't find something better.

Technically you don't have to have a DB selected to use the create DB command. That's an idiosyncrasy of Laravel's Schema Builder that it tries to select a DB before calling the method (in this case CreatedDatabase). Is there a way around this, so I can create the DB without Laravel first trying to select a null DB?