Designing database for your Laravel Application

Laravel is one of the trending PHP frameworks for a couple years now. Most of its advantages and benefits are all said from the post I linked. From Laravel helpers, authentication tool, database migration and many more.

Of course, with the support of its community some developed a tool that to make the development even more faster.

Since most of the web / online systems development heavily involves database design, I would consider Laravel is second to none when it comes to its database tool. There's the migration and schema builder. It eases the database table creation and updates. If you are in a huge team, table design or updating are easily done by using migration tool.

On top of these tools, I personally recommend  Laravel Schema Designer website as part of database design. Laravel SD features helps its users to create, export and share your Laravel Schema. As a typical database design, you can design tables, add fields to it, add relationships to other tables. Since this is mainly for Laravel, the field type options such as nullable, fillable etc are all available. Here's a simple illustration I screenshot.

The best in all of this is the complete export which includes migration, controller, model with the relationships as designed like this.

namespace App;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
class User extends Model
{
    protected $table = 'users';
    public $timestamps = true;
    public function role()
    {
        return $this->belongsToMany('Role');
    }
    public function attempts()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('Login_attempts');
    }
}

When all are set for your migrations, you can copy it to your laravel installation migration folder and execute the migration command to generate your schema. Some other files such as controllers are also available at php artisan commands so you might not need them anyway. In my case, I only use migration files.

That's what I can share for now.

I believe there are also other tools that is similar to the one I've posted. You can comment the tools you use in your Laravel development below.