How to Create Migration in Laravel

A lot of junior developer or not trained well developers create database manually. But this is not professional. Here we will take a professional look how to create laravel migrations using command line

php artisan make:migration create_tablename_table

The above command would create a migration file using corresponding table name. It's better to have a plural form of your table name which is a good convention.

Creating migration files

Say you wanna create a table name courses for your application. Then in your migration command you should use courses which is a plural form of course. So I would do the below command

php artisan make:migration create_courses_table

Then we will see in our database/migrations folder there is a new file. The file may look like this

<?php

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

return new class extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     */
    public function up(): void
    {
        Schema::create('courses', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->id();
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     */
    public function down(): void
    {
        Schema::dropIfExists('courses');
    }
};

At this moment if you run

php artisan migrate

It will create a table name courses with three fields

id
created_at
updated_at

But of course, you don't want to create simple table like that, it's no use. So it's time to add some fields in our migration tables.

We will add the below fields for our database

name
user_token
thumbnail
description
video
type_id

So now, in our file up() method look like this

 public function up(): void
    {
        Schema::create('courses', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->id();
            $table->string('user_token', 50);
            $table->string('name', 200);
            $table->string('thumbnail', 200)->nullable();
            $table->string('video', 200)->nullable();
            $table->text('description')->nullable();
            $table->smallInteger('type_id');
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

Now, if you run