Can't connect to MySQL with PDO

Question

I'm following this tutorial, I'm currently around minute 04:00 and I want to make a connection with my MySQL database through PDO. But my webpage will always give "Could not connect." when I'm trying to make the connection. When I used PHPStorms inside Database program, I had to change my serverTimezone to Europe/Amsterdam and then I was able to connect to my db.

I tried to add the port number in the 'new PDO()' code. I tried to change the timezone in the code and on my MySQL server but it gives this error;

mysql> SET GLOBAL time_zone = 'Europe/Amsterdam';
ERROR 1298 (HY000): Unknown or incorrect time zone: 'Europe/Amsterdam'

<?php

try {
    $pdo = new PDO('mysql:host=localhost:dbname=mytodo', 'root', '');
} catch (PDOException $e) {
    die('Could not connect.');
}

$statement = $pdo->prepare('select * from todos');

$statement->execute();

var_dump($statement->fetchAll());

require 'index.view.php';

Extra information:

mysql> SELECT @@global.time_zone, @@session.time_zone;
+--------------------+---------------------+
| @@global.time_zone | @@session.time_zone |
+--------------------+---------------------+
| SYSTEM             | SYSTEM              |
+--------------------+---------------------+

Answer 1

The tutorial you are following is very outdated.

A code connecting to PDO has to follow certain rules explained in my article How to connect to MySQL with PDO. In brief

• it should configure error reporting mode
• it should set the connection charset, the right way
• it shouldn't catch it's own errors to report them
• it should follow correct DSN syntax, without any extra decorations
• it also coud set a couple useful settings

So the code should be like this

$host = '127.0.0.1';
$db   = 'mytodo';
$user = 'root';
$pass = '';
$charset = 'utf8mb4';

$options = [
    \PDO::ATTR_ERRMODE            => \PDO::ERRMODE_EXCEPTION,
    \PDO::ATTR_DEFAULT_FETCH_MODE => \PDO::FETCH_ASSOC,
    \PDO::ATTR_EMULATE_PREPARES   => false,
];
$dsn = "mysql:host=$host;dbname=$db;charset=$charset";
$pdo = new \PDO($dsn, $user, $pass, $options);

Here you can see the proper connection code that does a lot of things. Among them, it tells you what the actual problem is when your code cannot connect to database.