Doctrine/DBAL/Driver/PDO/Exception with message 'SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Connection refused'

on a new laravel project, I was trying to use php artisan migrate and get an error message: 

Doctrine/DBAL/Driver/PDO/Exception with message 'SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Connection refused'

and then tried to use 

php artisan tinker

DB::connection()->getPdo();

get the same error message: 

Doctrine/DBAL/Driver/PDO/Exception with message 'SQLSTATE[HY000] [2002] Connection refused'

solution:

go to .env

change the 

DB_HOST=127.0.0.1

 

to

DB_HOST=localhost