How to make a Laravel model

Build a Laravel model with an example: a step-by-step guide to getting started quickly and easily.

Creating a Model in Laravel

Laravel provides an easy and powerful way to create models for your application. A model is a PHP class that contains all the logic for interacting with a particular database table. Models are used to retrieve, insert, and update information in your database.

In this tutorial, we'll create a model for our users table. This table contains information about our application's users such as their name, email address, and password.

To get started, we need to create the model class. This class should be placed in the app directory of your Laravel application. We will call our model class User.php:

<?php

namespace App;

use IlluminateDatabaseEloquentModel;

class User extends Model
{
    //
}

Next, we need to specify the table our model will be using. We can do this by adding the $table property to our model:

<?php

namespace App;

use IlluminateDatabaseEloquentModel;

class User extends Model
{
    protected $table = 'users';
}

Now that we have our model set up, we can start using it to interact with our users table. We can use the model to retrieve, insert, and update data in the table. We can also use the model to define relationships between different tables in our database.

For example, if we have a posts table that contains information about blog posts, we can create a relationship between the users and posts tables. We can do this by adding a function to our User model:

<?php

namespace App;

use IlluminateDatabaseEloquentModel;

class User extends Model
{
    protected $table = 'users';

    public function posts()
    {
        return $this->hasMany('AppPost');
    }
}

The posts() function tells Laravel that each user can have many posts. With this relationship defined, we can now easily retrieve all of the posts for a particular user. We can do this by calling the posts() function on an instance of our User model:

$user = AppUser::find(1);

$posts = $user->posts;

This code will retrieve all of the posts for the user with an ID of 1. We can also use this relationship to insert data into our posts table:

$user = AppUser::find(1);

$post = new AppPost;
$post->title = 'My first post';
$post->body = 'Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet...';

$user->posts()->save($post);

This code will create a new post for the user with an ID of 1. We can also update and delete posts using the same relationship:

// Update a post
$post = AppPost::find(1);
$post->title = 'Updated post title';
$post->save();

// Delete a post
$post = AppPost::find(1);
$post->delete();

By defining relationships between our models, we can easily and quickly retrieve, insert, update, and delete data in our database. We can also use models to define validation rules, custom scopes, and other methods to help us interact with our data.

We have now created a model in Laravel and seen how we can use it to interact with our database. Models are a powerful and easy way to interact with our data and help us keep our code organized and efficient.