Wake up your RDS Aurora Serverless before running your migrations

When you’re using an RDS Aurora Serverless DB instance with Laravel Vapor, you have the option to scale it down to zero capacity units when it’s been idle. This is great for development environments — it only takes a few seconds to come back up, and while it’s hibernating, you’re saving loads of money.

One downside is that your migrations may fail during deployments. When Vapor goes to run the php artisan migrate command, RDS often won’t wake up before Laravel’s DB connection attempt times out:

An error occurred during deployment.

Message: Deployment hook failed.
Hook: migrate --force

In Connection.php line 678:
                                                                               
  SQLSTATE[08006] [7] timeout expired (SQL: select * from information_schema.  
  tables where table_schema = public and table_name = migrations and table_ty  
  pe = 'BASE TABLE')                                                           
                                                                               

In Connector.php line 70:
                                       
  SQLSTATE[08006] [7] timeout expired  

I wrote an artisan command to poke the DB a couple times, and added this to my vapor.yml as its first deployment step.

<?php
 
// app/Console/Commands/WakeUpDatabase.php
 
namespace App\Console\Commands;
 
use Illuminate\Console\Command;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;
 
class WakeUpDatabase extends Command
{
    protected $signature = 'db:wake {retries=5 : attempts to make} {wait=5 : time to wait between retries, in seconds}';
    protected $description = 'Wakes up a potentially-inactive serverless RDS database';
 
    public function handle()
    {
        $retries = (int) $this->argument('retries');
        $wait_between = ((int) $this->argument('wait')) * 1000;
 
        retry($retries, fn () => DB::select('SELECT 1'), $wait_between);
 
        $this->info('Database is up');
    }
}

Add php artisan db:wake to your vapor.yml deploy: section, right above the migrate command, in each environment you have an Aurora Serverless DB.

Problem solved!