Update
The information in this post is no longer correct.
It is now possible to update columns using migrations by adding the Doctrine DBAL library to your Laravel site. https://laravel.com/docs/5.6/migrations#modifying-columns
p.s. Current Laravel is a joy to work with – I am most definitely now a fan :)
I’ve been messing around with Laravel – the ‘Clean & Classy PHP Framework’… I’m not totally sold yet, but there is a lot to like, so I am persevering.
One useful feature that Laravel includes is migrations – in essence the ability to place your database schema under version control along with your code.
Laravel handles migrations though it’s CLI ‘Artisan‘
Rather inexplicably (to me at least*) the migrations tool – Schema Builder does include the ability to modify columns once they have been created, however you can use use raw SQL as a workaround.
*Schemas evolve. I find myself often adding columns, tweaking existing columns regularly and dropping columns rather rarely…
Let’s build some migrations…
First things first – create the migrations table. This is used to keep track of migration within your application.
1. Open a terminal in the root of your application.
2. Create the migrations table:
php artisan migrate:install
3. Create an empty migrations script
php artisan migrate:make create_users
create_users is simply a descriptive name for your migration – you can call it anything you want…
This will create a skeleton file in /path_to_laravel/application/migrations that includes the timestamp in it’s name e.g.
2013_05_23_201939_create_users.php
class Create_Users {
/**
* Make changes to the database.
*
* @return void
*/
public function up()
{
//
}
/**
* Revert the changes to the database.
*
* @return void
*/
public function down()
{
//
}
}
This isn’t much use – we need to:
4. Write our migration – edit the file that we just created. Create the table and insert some test data.
class Create_Users {
/**
* Make changes to the database.
*
* @return void
*/
public function up()
{
Schema::create('users',function($table){
$table->increments('id');
$table->string('username', 20);
$table->string('email', 255);
$table->string('password', 255);
$table->boolean('active');
$table->timestamps();
});
DB::table('users')->insert(array(
'username' => 'admin',
'email' => '[email protected]',
'password' => Hash::make('123456'),
'active' => 1
));
}
/**
* Revert the changes to the database.
*
* @return void
*/
public function down()
{
//
}
5. Run the migration:
php artisan migrate
6. Ooops – forgotten to set a default on one of the fields.
Unfortunately you can’t change this via the Schema Builder, but we can still use another migration:
php artisan migrate:make update_users
This will create a file called something like 2013_05_23_202930_update_users.php
7. We need to write our migration. This needs to be actual SQL which we call with DBquery e.g.
class Modify_Users {
/**
* Make changes to the database.
*
* @return void
*/
public function up()
{
DB::query("ALTER TABLE `ltest`.`users` CHANGE COLUMN `active` `active` tinyint(1) NOT NULL DEFAULT '1';");
DB::table('users')->insert(array(
'username' => 'test2',
'email' => '[email protected]',
'password' => Hash::make('123456'),
));
}
/**
* Revert the changes to the database.
*
* @return void
*/
public function down()
{
//
}
}
I’ll insert another user and see if the default for the ‘active’ column is set correctly.
8. Run the migrations again.
php artisan migrate
Done!