"Too many connections" using PHPUnit for testing Laravel 4 on CircleCI

Starting to get a big test suite here on one of our projects, and our CI tool CircleCI just threw a wonky towards the end of the game because the database was refusing any more connections. Clearly an issue with the max_connections setting for MySQL (or whatever database you might be using). Unfortunately, I couldn't find a way to easily adjust this setting in our CircleCI testing environment. However, there is another way - simply close the database connection after each test. It adds a tiny bit of overhead to your testing, but hey, whatever gets the job done.

In your app/tests/TestCase.php add the following:

public function tearDown()
{
  DB::disconnect();
}

EDIT: Just got word from CircleCI with details on how to up the max_connections and it's super simple with this command (thanks Gordon!):

SET GLOBAL max_connections = <new value>;

EDIT 2: I've now written another post about solving the “too many connections” issue when testing Laravel 5.1.