Laravel 4: how to run a raw SQL?

Question

I want to rename a table in Laravel 4, but don\'t know how to do that.

The SQL is alter table photos rename to images. If there is an Eloquent solution,

Answer 1

The accepted way to rename a table in Laravel 4 is to use the Schema builder. So you would want to do:

Schema::rename('photos', 'images');

From http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/schema#creating-and-dropping-tables

If you really want to write out a raw SQL query yourself, you can always do:

DB::statement('alter table photos rename to images');

Note: Laravel's DB class also supports running raw SQL select, insert, update, and delete queries, like:

$users = DB::select('select id, name from users');

For more info, see http://laravel.com/docs/4.2/database#running-queries.