Migrations

Migrations are version control for your database schema — plain PHP files describing how to build (and unbuild) tables, so your whole team and every environment stay in sync without ever running raw SQL by hand.

php artisan make:migration create_posts_table

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

return new class extends Migration {
    public function up(): void
    {
        Schema::create('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->id();
            $table->foreignId('user_id')->constrained()->cascadeOnDelete();
            $table->string('title');
            $table->text('body');
            $table->boolean('published')->default(false);
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

    public function down(): void
    {
        Schema::dropIfExists('posts');
    }
};

Run pending migrations with php artisan migrate. Useful variants: migrate:rollback (undo the last batch), migrate:refresh (roll back everything and re-run), and migrate:fresh (drop all tables and re-run from scratch — great for local development, never on production). php artisan make:migration add_status_to_posts_table --table=posts scaffolds an alter-table migration for adding columns later.