Laravel Cartalyst Sentinel - Adding a username column to users table (What is the right way)

Question

I've pulled in cartalyst/sentinel and i've run the migrations required to generate the tables

php artisan migrate --package=cartalyst/sentinel

I notice that these are the columns available in the users table

1. id
2. email
3. password
4. permissions
5. last_login
6. first_name
7. last_name
8. created_at
9. updated_at

I'd like to add username after the email. So i created a migration file that does that.

//add a column username after email in the users table
$table->string('username')->after('email')->unique();

Now when i use Sentinel::register

$credentials = Input::all();
$user = Sentinel::register($credentials);

The username doesn't get saved in the table. So i've managed to get it fillable by editing vendor/cartalyst/sentinel/src/Users/EloquentUser.php

protected $fillable = [
    'email',
    'username', /* i added this */
    'password',
    'last_name',
    'first_name',
    'permissions',
];

Now this works, the username gets stored in the table. But im wondering if what i'm doing is right? Should we not touch the files in the packages folder. How do we solve this?

Answer 1

Almost. You have to create your own User clas, extending vendor/cartalyst/sentinel/src/Users/EloquentUser.php:

use Cartalyst\Sentinel\Users\EloquentUser as CartalystUser;

class User extends CartalystUser {

    protected $fillable = [
        'email',
        'username', /* i added this */
        'password',
        'last_name',
        'first_name',
        'permissions',
    ];

}

Publish Sentinel's config:

php artisan config:publish cartalyst/sentinel

And in the config file, set the user model to your own:

'users' => [

    'model' => 'Your\Namespace\User',

],