Laravel valet 502 error when using postgres pgsql driver

I recently faced an issue where my local Laravel installation would stop working when using the pgsql database driver. The error was a pretty obscure 502 NGINX error page - which is always a trigger to investigate the logs.

Quick tip, in Valet you can tail the logs pretty easily:

valet log -f php-fpm
valet log -f nginx

After some digging in the NGINX logs, I noticed it was FPM that stopped responding:

[error] 35039#0: *1 upstream prematurely closed connection while reading response header from upstream

And the FPM logs were pretty bizarre, stating the process was killed using SIGABRT.

WARNING: [pool valet] child 35051 exited on signal 6 (SIGABRT) after 1.472859 seconds from start
NOTICE: [pool valet] child 35063 started

To make things even stranger, using php artisan serve everything worked as intended.

Luckily, I came across this article explaining the issue is linked to the GSSAPI Encryption, and simply disabling this fixes the issue.

Fixing PostgreSQL Connection Issues in Laravel Valet on macOS

Jan Östlund’s blog – an independent developer in Umeå, Sweden specializing in developing useful software.

One addendum on Jan's blog: when using an Apple Sillicon Mac, you can find the config files here:

sudo nano /opt/homebrew/etc/php/8.2/php-fpm.d/valet-fpm.conf 

Just adding the following line to the valet-fpm.conf file (and running valet restart) fixes the issue:

env['PGGSSENCMODE'] = disable