Find User in Laravel by Username

Question

So typically if you have access to the id of a user in laravel you can run User::find($id), however say you don\'t have access to the user\'s id and only their username. Is

Answer 1

$user_id = DB::table('users')->where('username', $user_input)->first();

without "->id"

check here: http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/queries