Migration creation in Laravel - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Migration creation

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple Laravel application to manage a list of books in a library. You need to create a database table to store book information.

🎯 Goal: Create a Laravel migration file that defines a books table with specific columns.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a migration file named create_books_table

Define a books table with columns: id, title, author, published_year, and timestamps

Set id as an auto-incrementing primary key

Make title and author columns strings

Make published_year an integer

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Migrations help you create and modify database tables in a safe, version-controlled way when building Laravel applications.

💼 Career

Knowing how to write migrations is essential for backend Laravel developers to manage database schema changes collaboratively.

1

Create the migration class skeleton

Create a migration class named CreateBooksTable that extends Migration. Inside it, add empty up and down methods.

Laravel

<?php

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

class CreateBooksTable extends Migration
{
    public function up()
    {
        // Your code here
    }

    public function down()
    {
        // Your code here
    }
}

Need a hint?

Start by defining the migration class and the two required methods up and down.

2

Add the table creation schema

Inside the up method, use Schema::create to create a table named books with a Blueprint callback parameter named $table.

Laravel

<?php

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

class CreateBooksTable extends Migration
{
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('books', function (Blueprint $table) {
            // Your code here
        });
    }

    public function down()
    {
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use Schema::create with the table name books and a callback function with $table as parameter.

3

Define the columns inside the table

Inside the Schema::create callback, add these columns to $table: an auto-incrementing id, string title, string author, integer published_year, and timestamps.

Laravel

<?php

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

class CreateBooksTable extends Migration
{
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('books', function (Blueprint $table) {
            // Add columns here
        });
    }

    public function down()
    {
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use the Laravel schema builder methods to add the columns with the exact names and types.

4

Add the table drop in the down method

Inside the down method, add code to drop the books table using Schema::dropIfExists('books').

Laravel

id();
            $table->string('title');
            $table->string('author');
            $table->integer('published_year');
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

    public function down()
    {
        // Your code here
    }
}

Need a hint?

Use Schema::dropIfExists with the table name books to remove the table when rolling back.