Handling Session Database Errors

Hello,

I am working on implementing database sessions. I want to make sure that my application fails gracefully if for instance the database is unavailable.

A simple way is to catch any Exceptions at the application level and display a custom error view. However, in doing this I notice that the laravel default error page displays instead of my custom page. In looking further and the laravel code I noticed that the location where the default page is coming from is vendor\symfony\debug\Symfony\Component\Debug\ExceptionHandler.php:~240.

I assume that since creating sessions is one of the first things that happens in the application life cycle using the following code doesn't work.

App::fatal(function($exception)
{
    // Log error
        return Response::view('custom-down-page', [], 500);
});

The only other thought I had to fix this issue is to add a try catch block to the entire public\index.php file. Something like this.

try
{
    //...
        $app->run();
}
catch(Exception $e)
{
    // Log error
        echo file_get_contents(__DIR__.'/custom-down-page.html');
}

Is there a better way to handle this?

Thanks in advance.