Using non-conventional columns in Laravel's Migrations
Migrations in Laravel are a great way to manage your database schema. From the ability to easily create and drop tables, to the ability to add and remove columns, migrations are an essential part of any Laravel application.
And though migrations covers everything related to a database schema under the sun, there might be a few things that might be missing. Like when you upgrade your application to use a new version of MySQL, chances are Laravel might not have support of the new column types.
So, for instance, imagine a scenario, where we would like to create a:
- Table named
posts - Containing auto-increment column
id - Containing an integer column of display width
1namedlegacy_booleanwith a default value of0 - Containing a composite index for these two columns
The example is pretty trivial but it’s just to illustrate the point.
As of today, you would have to use database statements to add such columns like so.
new class extends Migration {
public function up()
{
Schema::create('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->id();
});
DB::statement('alter table `posts` add `legacy_boolean` int(1) default 0 not null');
Schema::table('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->index(['id', 'legacy_boolean']);
});
}
};
This works fine but as you might have noticed, there’s a sacrifice you have to make here. We cannot use a single table creation callback, because database statements are fired immediately and therefore cannot be used in Schema::create(<table>, <callback>).
To get around this, we now have a new method called
Blueprint::rawColumn()which supports directly specifiying the column type definition used for creating a column.
So, we can rewite the above migration as follows.
new class extends Migration {
public function up()
{
Schema::create('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->id();
$table->rawColumn('legacy_boolean', 'int(1)')->default(0);
$table->index(['id', 'legacy_boolean']);
});
}
};
As you can tell, the rawColumn() method accepts the column type definition as the second argument where you can specify the column type which Laravel doesn’t support out of the box which is pretty convenient.
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