Laravel 9.52 and Caching_Sha2_Password

It sounds like you're encountering an issue with persistent connections and the caching_sha2_password authentication plugin in MySQL 8.0. The caching_sha2_password plugin requires either an SSL connection or an unencrypted connection with an exchange of RSA keys to secure the password when logging in.

Here are a few steps you can take to troubleshoot and resolve the issue:

1. Ensure SSL is enabled on the MySQL server: If you're not using SSL, you should enable it to ensure that passwords are securely transmitted.

2. Configure Laravel to use SSL: If you decide to use SSL, you'll need to configure your Laravel application to use it for database connections. You can do this by modifying the config/database.php file or the .env file to include the necessary SSL options.

Here's an example of how you might configure SSL in your config/database.php:

'mysql' => [
    // ...
    'options'   => array(
        PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_SSL_CA => '/path/to/ca-cert.pem',
        PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_SSL_CERT => '/path/to/client-cert.pem',
        PDO::MYSQL_ATTR_SSL_KEY => '/path/to/client-key.pem',
    ),
    // ...
],

Make sure to replace the paths with the actual paths to your SSL certificates.

1. Disable persistent connections: If you're not using SSL, another option is to disable persistent connections in your Laravel database configuration. Persistent connections can cause issues with the caching_sha2_password plugin because the session state is not reset when the connection is reused.

You can disable persistent connections by setting the 'persistent' option to false in your config/database.php file:

'mysql' => [
    // ...
    'options'   => [
        PDO::ATTR_PERSISTENT => false,
    ],
    // ...
],

1. Update MySQL user to use mysql_native_password: As a last resort, if you cannot use SSL and disabling persistent connections does not work, you may consider reverting the authentication method for your MySQL user to mysql_native_password. However, this is not recommended as it is deprecated and less secure.

To change the authentication method for a user, you can run the following SQL command:

ALTER USER 'yourusername'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH 'mysql_native_password' BY 'yourpassword';

Replace 'yourusername', 'localhost', and 'yourpassword' with your actual MySQL username, host, and password.

After making any of these changes, be sure to restart your Laravel application and clear the configuration cache using the following Artisan command:

php artisan config:cache

Try these solutions one by one and see which one resolves the issue with your Laravel application and MySQL 8.0.34 using caching_sha2_password.