Make column not nullable in a Laravel migration

Question

I\'m writing a migration to make certain columns in a table nullable right now. For the down function, I of course want to make those columns not nullable

Answer 1

First run this:

composer require doctrine/dbal

Then create a migration that will alter the table like so:

php artisan make:migration fix_whatever_table_name_here

public function up()
{
    Schema::table('table_name', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->type('column')->nullable(false)->change();
    });
}

# public function down()
# {
#     Schema::table('table_name', function ($table) {
#         $table->dropColumn('column');
#     });
# }

Answer 2

You can just declare the column again without ->nullable() and use ->change

public function up()
{
    Schema::table('table_name', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->type('column')->change();
    });
}

public function down()
{
    Schema::table('table_name', function ($table) {
        $table->type('column')->nullable()->change();
    });
}

Answer 3

Prior to Laravel 5 there was no Laravel native way of altering an existing table column using the schema builder. You'd need to use raw queries for this.

However, as of Laravel 5 you can use:

$table->...->nullable(false)->change();

Answer 4

As of Laravel 5, it's possible to reverse this natively - simply pass false as an argument to nullable().

e.g.

$table -> string('foo') -> nullable(false) -> change();