Find or Create with Eloquent

Question

I have recently started working with Laravel and Eloquent, and was wondering about the lack of a find or create option for models. You could always write, for example:

Answer 1

Below is the original accepted answer for: Laravel-4

There is already a method findOrFail available in Laravel and when this method is used it throws ModelNotFoundException on fail but in your case you can do it by creating a method in your model, for example, if you have a User model then you just put this function in the model

// Put this in any model and use
// Modelname::findOrCreate($id);
public static function findOrCreate($id)
{
    $obj = static::find($id);
    return $obj ?: new static;
}

From your controller, you can use

$user =  User::findOrCreate(5);
$user->first_name = 'John';
$user->last_name = 'Doe';
$user->save();

If a user with id of 5 exists, then it'll be updated, otherwise a new user will be created but the id will be last_user_id + 1 (auto incremented).

This is another way to do the same thing:

public function scopeFindOrCreate($query, $id)
{
    $obj = $query->find($id);
    return $obj ?: new static;
}

Instead of creating a static method, you can use a scope in the Model, so the method in the Model will be scopeMethodName and call Model::methodName(), same as you did in the static method, for example

$user =  User::findOrCreate(5);

Update:

The firstOrCreate is available in Laravel 5x, the answer is too old and it was given for Laravel-4.0 in 2013.

In Laravel 5.3, the firstOrCreate method has the following declaration:

public function firstOrCreate(array $attributes, array $values = [])

Which means you can use it like this:

User::firstOrCreate(['email' => $email], ['name' => $name]);

User's existence will be only checked via email, but when created, the new record will save both email and name.

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