Catching PDO Exception

You can just create a custom 500 error page at resources/views/errors/500.blade.php That page should be served on all 500 errors.

If you want to catch PDO exceptions in particular, you can either wrap your code in a try/catch block like:

        try {
            # your code should be here
            
        } catch (\PDOException $e) {
            # do something or render a custom error page
            
        }

Or you can generalize that by editing app/Exceptions/Handler.php to add the following block at the very top of the render() method:

    public function render($request, Exception $e)
    {
        if ($e instanceof \PDOException) {
            # do something special or render a custom error
        }
        .
        .
        .
    }

try/catch does not work for me, what I do wrong...

PDOException in Connector.php line 55: SQLSTATE[42000] [1049] Unknown database 'test'

try
        {
            DB::connection()->getDatabaseName();

            //self::$instance = new static();
            self::$r = \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model::getConnectionResolver();

            $settings = array(
                'driver'    => 'mysql',
                'host'      => env('DB_DATA_HOST', '127.0.0.1'),
                'database'  => $databasename,
                'username'  => $username,
                'password'  => $password,
                'charset'   => 'utf8',
                'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
                'prefix'    => '',
                'strict'    => false
            );

            $container = new Container;
            $connFactory = new ConnectionFactory($container);
            $conn = $connFactory->make($settings);
            $resolver = new \Illuminate\Database\ConnectionResolver();
            $resolver->addConnection('default', $conn);
            $resolver->setDefaultConnection('default');
            \Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model::setConnectionResolver($resolver);

            return $conn;
        }
        catch(\PDOException $e)
        {
            echo $e->getMessage();
        }

        catch(Exception $e)
        {
            echo $e->getMessage();
        }

        return null;

I tried also

catch(PDOException $e)

This worked but I need to catch it in model and return false if there is a db problem . I don't want to redirect to whoops page...

public function render($request, Exception $e)
 {
        if($e instanceof \PDOException )
        {
            return response()->view('errors.500', [], 500);
        }
        return parent::render($request, $e);
 }

Looks like my laravel5 overwrites php.ini settings - I confirmed below configuration under phpinfo() on different none laravel project

display_errors  On
error_reporting 22527

Laravel5 ?????? - why ?

display_errors  Off
error_reporting -1

I cannot even catch simple error

try
        {
            return $conn;
        }
        catch(\PDOException $e)
        {
            echo $e->getMessage();
        }

        catch(Exception $e)
        {
            echo $e->getMessage();
        }

        return null;

Results

ErrorException in DataModel.php line 36: Undefined variable: conn

I know this is going to sound crazy but I think it wasn't working because you didn't have the backslash before Exception. For anyone reading this, I kept on getting PDOExceptions throw even though I was catching them?!

Anyways, it turns out that there is a difference between:

try {
    // code here
} catch (PDOException $e) {
    // code here
}

and

try {
    // code here
} catch (\PDOException $e) {
    // code here
}

Once I added that backslash it was all fine XD! I assume this also applies for normal Exeptions as well.

It has to do with namespacing, even using getPdo() with a fetch

$results = $sth->fetchAll(\PDO::FETCH_ASSOC);

you put a \ in front of pdo.

@Kerren and @ jirdw, You were absolutely right! This was the solution! Thx!