Laravel Starter - PHP User Group (Myanmar)

Laravel Starter
Schema::table() accepts two arguments. The first is the name of the table that you'll be
interacting with, in this case it's users. The second argument is a closure which contains your
table definition. The closure receives the argument $table and this is the object that we'll be
interacting with to define the table.
$table->create();
This line tells Laravel that the table will need to be created. If we omit this line, Schema will
generate the ALTER TABLE syntax rather than the CREATE TABLE syntax.
$table->increments('id');
The increments() method tells Schema that the specified field should be an autoincremented
primary key. With Laravel, you'll want to use simple field names such as id, email,
and password. If you aren't familiar with using Object-Relational Mapping (ORM), you may be
in the habit of creating those same field names with the table name as a prefix. For example,
user_id, user_email, user_password. The purpose behind defining field names with
the table name as a prefix is to simplify query generation when using a query builder. This is no
longer necessary and it's best to follow the more simple convention as it manages redundant
interactions for you, removing the need for you to continuously write the boilerplate code.
$table->string('email');
$table->string('real_name');
$table->string('password');
Next we have a few string declarations. These will be created as the VARCHAR fields with the
default length of 200. You can override the length of these fields by passing a second argument
that represents the intended length. For example:
$table->string('email', 300);
This line creates a VARCHAR field named email with a length of 300.
It's important to note that we shouldn't reduce the size of the password
field as we'll need that length for the output from Laravel's Hash class.
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$table->timestamps();
Finally, we come to the timestamps() method. This will create two DATETIME fields
(created_at and updated_at). It is not unreasonable to create the timestamp fields for
every table in the database as they can be very useful for troubleshooting down the road. The
Eloquent ORM will automatically manage these timestamp fields for us. So, we can forget
about them for now.
The down() method should revert any changes made to the up() method. In this case, the up()
method creates a database table called users. So, the down() method should remove the table.
Schema::drop('users');