Laravel 4.2 Migrations & Seeding

Introduction

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.

Creating Migrations

To create a migration, you may use the migrate:make command on the Artisan CLI:

php artisan migrate:make create_users_table

The migration will be placed in your app/database/migrations folder, and will contain a timestamp which allows the framework to determine the order of the migrations.

You may also specify a --path option when creating the migration. The path should be relative to the root directory of your installation:

php artisan migrate:make foo --path=app/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 migrate:make add_votes_to_user_table --table=users

php artisan migrate:make create_users_table --create=users

Running Migrations

Running All Outstanding Migrations

php artisan migrate

Running All Outstanding Migrations For A Path

php artisan migrate --path=app/foo/migrations

Running All Outstanding Migrations For A Package

php artisan migrate --package=vendor/package

Note: If you receive a "class not found" error when running migrations, try running the composer dump-autoload command.

Forcing Migrations In Production

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

Rolling Back Migrations

Rollback The Last Migration Operation

php artisan migrate:rollback

Rollback all migrations

php artisan migrate:reset

Rollback all migrations and run them all again

php artisan migrate:refresh

php artisan migrate:refresh --seed

Database Seeding

Laravel also includes a simple way to seed your database with test data using seed classes. All seed classes are stored in app/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.

Example Database Seed Class

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(array('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