Migrations are a type of version control for your database. They allow a team to modify the database schema and stay up to date on the current schema state. Migrations are typically paired with the Schema Builder to easily manage your application's schema.
To create a migration, you may use the make:migration
command on the Artisan CLI:
php artisan make:migration create_users_table
The migration will be placed in your database/migrations
folder, and will contain a timestamp which allows the framework to determine the order of the migrations.
The --table
and --create
options may also be used to indicate the name of the table, and whether the migration will be creating a new table:
php artisan make:migration add_votes_to_user_table --table=users
php artisan make:migration create_users_table --create=users
php artisan migrate
Note: If you receive a "class not found" error when running migrations, try running the
composer dump-autoload
command.
Some migration operations are destructive, meaning they may cause you to lose data. In order to protect you from running these commands against your production database, you will prompted for confirmation before these commands are executed. To force the commands to run without a prompt, use the --force
flag:
php artisan migrate --force
php artisan migrate:rollback
php artisan migrate:reset
php artisan migrate:refresh
php artisan migrate:refresh --seed
Laravel also includes a simple way to seed your database with test data using seed classes. All seed classes are stored in database/seeds
. Seed classes may have any name you wish, but probably should follow some sensible convention, such as UserTableSeeder
, etc. By default, a DatabaseSeeder
class is defined for you. From this class, you may use the call
method to run other seed classes, allowing you to control the seeding order.
class DatabaseSeeder extends Seeder {
public function run()
{
$this->call('UserTableSeeder');
$this->command->info('User table seeded!');
}
}
class UserTableSeeder extends Seeder {
public function run()
{
DB::table('users')->delete();
User::create(['email' => 'foo@bar.com']);
}
}
To seed your database, you may use the db:seed
command on the Artisan CLI:
php artisan db:seed
By default, the db:seed
command runs the DatabaseSeeder
class, which may be used to call other seed classes. However, you may use the --class
option to specify a specific seeder class to run individually:
php artisan db:seed --class=UserTableSeeder
You may also seed your database using the migrate:refresh
command, which will also rollback and re-run all of your migrations:
php artisan migrate:refresh --seed