# Migrations

By

Charl Cronje

To create a table to hold our data, we'll use the Laravel migration system. Migrations let you expressively define modifications to your database, and easily share them with the rest of your team.

First, let's configure a database connection. You may configure all of your database connections from the app/config/database.php file. By default, Laravel is configured to use MySQL, and you will need to supply connection credentials within the database configuration file. If you wish, you may change the driver option to sqlite and it will use the SQLite database included in the app/database directory.

Next, to create the migration, we'll use the Artisan CLI. From the root of your project, run the following from your terminal:

    php artisan migrate:make create_users_table

Next, find the generated migration file in the app/database/migrations folder. This file contains a class with two methods: up and down. In the up method, you should make the desired changes to your database tables, and in the down method you simply reverse them.

Let's define a migration that looks like this:

    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('users', function($table)
        {
            $table->increments('id');
            $table->string('email')->unique();
            $table->string('name');
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

    public function down()
    {
        Schema::drop('users');
    }

Next, we can run our migrations from our terminal using the migrate command. Simply execute this command from the root of your project:

    php artisan migrate

If you wish to rollback a migration, you may issue the migrate:rollback command. Now that we have a database table, let's start pulling some data!