cannot use some drush commands

Question

I am running into some trouble with drush I can't pm-enable the modules I just downloaded with it. I did some research but none of the solution worked for me, most cases involved switching "localhost" to "127.0.0.1" in settings.php but my database is located on a docker container. I am running drush from the root folder.

Here the output I get when running drush en module1, module2

    root@c4765ef094a2:/var/www/html# drush en pathauto, token, 
    simple_gmap, addtoany, scheduler, devel, devel_generate
    Command pm-enable needs a higher bootstrap level to run - you will 
    need to invoke drush from a more functional   [error]
    Drupal environment to run this command.
    The drush command 'en pathauto, token, simple_gmap, addtoany, 
    scheduler, devel, devel_generate' could not be     [error]
    executed.
    Drush was not able to start (bootstrap) the Drupal database.                                                     
    [error]
    Hint: This may occur when Drush is trying to:
     * bootstrap a site that has not been installed or does not have a 
    configured database. In this case you can
    select another site with a working database setup by specifying the 
    URI to use with the --uri parameter on the
    command line. See `drush topic docs-aliases` for details.
     * connect the database through a socket. The socket file may be 
    wrong or the php-cli may have no access to it in
    a jailed shell. See http://drupal.org/node/1428638 for details.

    Drush was attempting to connect to: 
     Drupal version         :  8.4.0                                                                                
     Site URI               :  http://default                                                                       
     Database driver        :  mysql                                                                                
     Database hostname      :  mariadb                                                                              
     Database port          :  3306                                                                                 
     Database username      :  root                                                                                 
     Database name          :  drupal                                                                               
     PHP executable         :  /usr/local/bin/php                                                                   
     PHP configuration      :                                                                                       
     PHP OS                 :  Linux                                                                                
     Drush script           :  
     /var/www/html/vendor/drush/drush/drush.php                                           
     Drush version          :  8.1.15                                                                               
     Drush temp directory   :  /tmp                                                                                 
     Drush configuration    :                                                                                       
     Drush alias files      :                                                                                       
     Drupal root            :  /var/www/html                                                                        
     Drupal Settings File   :  sites/default/settings.php                                                           
     Site path              :  sites/default                                                                        
     Sync config path       :  sites/default/files/config_oL5MBo-
     2_ALSPTKnAwZb1o3WVs19lndEmQpb4zfSv42kL9A8F0bp4g_de 
                       mvUvf96DBkH3qyYww/sync

Here's the output of drush sql-connect

mysql --user=root --password=root --database=drupal --host=mariadb --
port=3306

I have been stuck on this for 2 hours so any help would be greatly appreciated

Answer 1

I prefer to use drush from drush alias files, so that the magic of Drush figuring out everything from the document root isn't so magical and you can sometimes more easily debug issues from a proper drush alias file.

As others mention it's likely the database connection that's not working. In docker you can use the --add-host build option, or the extra_hosts docker-compose options to give a name to your database container (docker can use the container name to properly create the /etc/hosts entry at runtime).

See this stackexchange answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/38306666/1491507

By following the above directions in docker-compose an entry such as the following that creates a named hosted in /etc/hosts as my_resolved_db_service which is magically resolved to the mariadb container.

extra_hosts:
  - "my_resolved_db_service:mariadb"

Then in a drush alias file, or when installing drupal via drush you would use the /etc/host name created: drush si --db-url=mysql://root:root@my_resolved_db_service/drupal as an example.