Setup - PDF test fails

We are testing InvoiceNinja on both our own linux Ubuntu and DB servers and a shared hosting platform. On a shared hosting platform, after uploading everything to our web directory, renaming env.example to .env and starting the setup process we immediately fail the PDF test with “Oops, looks like something isn’t correct!”.

Larval.log shows this for some reason:
[2023-02-24 22:15:06] production.INFO: db fails

Any ideas. We’ve not changed anything in the default .ENV file yet.

After some messing around we found that if we prefill the .env file with our APP_URL and all the DB and SMTP info, the PDF test will pass. To test our theory, we uploaded the original env.example file with stock values and could not get past the PDF test. Edit that file to prefill the fields and then the PDF test passes. Very odd. I’ve heard from others that InvoiceNinja’s self hosted software can be a pain but some of the stuff we are coming across us odd.