Laravel Eloquent Tips and Tricks

Bayram EKER

3 min readJul 25, 2022

Add columns without breaking tables

we add a school_name column to the contacts table

To add it right after the phone column, we write ->after(phone)

Increments and Decrements

Instead of this:

You can do this:

Also these will work:

Boot Method

There is a magical place called boot() in an Eloquent model where you can override default behavior:

If you want to generate some DB column value when creating a record, add it to the model’s boot() method. For example, if you have a field “number” and want to assign the next available number to the new record (like job::max(‘number’) + 1), do this:

Count on relationship

Laravel allows you to return to the total number of rows of a relationship module instead of getting a full data object.

Define a relation jobs

firstOr(function() {})

When searching for the first record, you want to perform some actions, when you don’t find it. firstOrFail() throws a 404 Exception. You can use firstOr(function() {}) instead. Laravel got your covered.

Automatic Column Value When Creating Records

If you want to generate some DB column value when creating record, add it to model’s boot() method. For example, if you have a field "position" and want to assign the next available position to the new record (like Country::max('position') + 1), do this:

Find Many

Eloquent method find() may accept multiple parameters, and then it returns a Collection of all records found, not just one Model:

Find by Key

You can also find multiple records with whereKey() method which takes care of which field is exactly your primary key (id is the default but you may override it in Eloquent model):