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

You can use firstOrCreate (It's working with Laravel 4.2)

$bucketUser = BucketUser::firstOrCreate([
    'bucket_id' => '1',
    'user_id'   => '2',
]);

returns found instance or new instance.