Management of migrations and database management in Laravel

Laravel is one of the most popular PHP frameworks due to its simplicity and advanced features in web development. One of the very significant possibilities of Laravel is the use of the migration system for managing databases. This system allows developers to easily make structural changes in their own databases and transfer these changes to other teams.

Migrations in Laravel are defined as PHP classes that are stored in the database/migrations directory. Each migration contains two main methods: up and down. The up method is used to add or modify a table, and the down method is used to revert to the previous settings.

Working with migrations in Laravel has many benefits, such as: change history management, the ability to rollback changes, and continuous process development. Development teams can record changes in the database using the artisan migrate command and revert versions using artisan migrate:rollback.

For example, you can use the following command to create a new migration to create a table named "users":

php artisan make:migration create_users_table

Next, you can implement the necessary changes in the created migration file:

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

class CreateUsersTable extends Migration
{
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->id();
            $table->string('name');
            $table->string('email')->unique();
            $table->string('password');
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

    public function down()
    {
        Schema::dropIfExists('users');
    }
}

After writing the migration, to execute it in the database, use the following command:

php artisan migrate

Now, let’s review what this code does:

<?php: start of the PHP file
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;: importing the base migration class
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;: importing Blueprint for table creation
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;: importing the Schema facade for database interactions
class CreateUsersTable extends Migration: starting to define a migration class named CreateUsersTable
public function up(): the method used when running the migration to implement changes
Schema::create('users', function (Blueprint $table): defining a new table named users
$table->id();: adding an ID column as the primary key
$table->string('name');: defining a column for storing the user's name
$table->string('email')->unique();: defining an email column which must be unique
$table->string('password');: defining a column for storing the password
$table->timestamps();: adding default timestamp columns for created and updated times
public function down(): the method used for rolling back the migration to remove changes
Schema::dropIfExists('users');: dropping the users table if it exists