Managing Databases in Laravel with Eloquent ORM

This article explains how to use Eloquent ORM in Laravel to manage databases, including creating models, relationships, queries and best practices.

Summary

1. What is Eloquent ORM?
2. Creating models
3. Migrations and database structure
4. Relationships between models
5. Eloquent queries
6. Best practices
7. Conclusion

What is Eloquent ORM?

Eloquent ORM is Laravel's native Object-Relational Mapper, which lets you interact with the database through PHP models, without writing raw SQL.

Creating models

php artisan make:model Post -m

This creates the Post model and a matching migration.

Post.php

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Post extends Model
{
    protected $fillable = ['title', 'content'];
}

Migrations and database structure

Example migration:

public function up()
{
    Schema::create('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->id();
        $table->string('title');
        $table->text('content');
        $table->timestamps();
    });
}

Run the migrations:

php artisan migrate

Relationships between models

• One-to-Many:

  class User extends Model {
    public function posts() {
        return $this->hasMany(Post::class);
    }
  }

• Many-to-Many:

  class Role extends Model {
    public function users() {
        return $this->belongsToMany(User::class);
    }
  }

Eloquent queries

// All posts
$posts = Post::all();

// Post by id
$post = Post::find(1);

// Create a post
Post::create(['title' => 'Title', 'content' => 'Content']);

// Update
$post->update(['title' => 'New title']);

// Delete
$post->delete();

Best practices

• Use $fillable or $guarded for protection.
• Use relationships to avoid repeated queries.
• Take advantage of scopes for reusable filters.

Conclusion

Eloquent ORM makes managing databases in Laravel more intuitive and faster, letting developers write clean, structured code.