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Update existing table's column with migration without losing data in Laravel

M H Hasib on May 20, 2021

Before going to start our coding we need to know about Laravel Migration and how it helps us. First of all, if we want to build a project. We need...
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Hassan Zekkouri •

Thank you. It saved me time.

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Mukul Sharma •

I though with ORM it's only one way. Thanks for this great article.

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Fatima Almashhor •

Thank you for this . it save my life.

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Brian Kanyi Karanja •

Well discussed. It worked for me. Thank you

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M H Hasib •

Thanks.

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Arvind Kumar •

Thanks!

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M H Hasib •

Welcome Brother.

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krognome •

So I'm pretty damns sure if I run php artisan migrate it will without any question run all my migration files and delete all of the data. I see people thanking you here like they did not lose all their data but it always removes all the data every time I run that command. So I simply run the 1 migration file with: php artisan migrate --path=/database/migrations/full_migration_file_name_migration.php

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JackLeEmmerdeur • • Edited

I just tried this. Before I always used php artisan migrate:refresh, but I needed schema altering with data retention.

For me php artisan migrate only applied the new migration and left the data of unmodified tables untouched, opposed to the above refresh-modifier.

Maybe it has been, like you described, in an old Laravel version?
If unsure there is also php artisan migrate --pretend. It shows the SQL the migrations would produce without executing them.

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M H Hasib • • Edited

php artisan migrate will execute the files which is not in migrations table. Please read the documentation carefully.

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Tanvir Rahman Prince •

Thanks. This is very helpful

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M H Hasib •

You are welcome <3

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vit •

So basically guys, if I try to add phone_number inside the users migration file 1, it will drop table and create another one? So my data will be lost