laravel-restful | A base controller for laravel

I'm working on a brand new laravel application for learning laravel.

I've done the following (I'm following this tutorial):

1. Created new application using laravel new test_project_2
2. Setup the .env file
3. Created a database called laravel
4. Run php artisan migrate

This is my .env file:

This is what I get:

As you can see, I can use the "laravel" database perfectly well when I'm logged into Mariadb via terminal. The website also renders absolutely fine. I did run the SQL command - SQL: select * from information_schema.tables where table_schema = laravel and table_name = migrations and table_type = 'BASE TABLE' but I got the message ERROR 1054 (42S22): Unknown column 'laravel' in 'where clause'

Note - I've worked on other dummy laravel projects last week and didn't face any problems, although admittedly I'm not sure if I ran the php artisan migrate command for those (wasn't required, but I might have run it just cause I kept seeing it).

• Why is this problem happening?
• How do I fix it?