How to delete column in laravel migration ?

Deleting column to existing table are easy as creating a new table and adding columns to it. To delete column in laravel migration to existing table we can use the same method we used in create migrations . Major difference between creating new table and updating new table is Schema::create and Schema::table In this tutorial we will create a new migration file and then will delete a column status to the existing table .\

I hope you know about How to make database connection in Laravel 8 ?

We will use the php artisan command to generate the delete column in laravel migration and php artisan migrate command to modify the table.

I am assuming that you have already table movies in database and now we are deleting column. also you can read How to add column in laravel migration ?

Let’s understand the delete column in laravel migration in laravel step by step

Step 1 : Generate migration file

To generate the migration file we will use the laravel artisan command so open the terminal in project and run below command

php artisan make:migration DeleteStatusMoviesTable

Above command will create a migration file in folder database/migrations

Output: 
Created Migration: 2022_02_17_172323_delete_status_movies_table

Step 2 : Open generated migration file and update

In the last step we created a migration file using the artisan command and now we wanted to delete column to schema of movies table.

so let’s open the file and start editing

<?php

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

class DeleteStatusMoviesTable extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        //
    }

    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function down()
    {
        //
    }
}

In the file there is a class named as DeleteStatusMoviesTable and it extends Migration class. DeleteStatusMoviesTable class contains two methods one is up and other one is down.

Up is used to update the database scheme and down method is used to rollback the changes of this migration. As you can see we are creating table movies in up method and dropping the table in down method.

let’s add delete the column using dropColumn method from our table before updating the database.

 public function up()
 {
        Schema::table('movies', function (Blueprint $table) {
             
           $table->dropColumn('status');
           // $table->dropColumn(['status', 'another_column']);
            
        });
 }
 public function down()
 {
        Schema::table('movies', function (Blueprint $table) {
              $table->integer('status');
        });
 }

Here we used Schema::table to update the table.

Step 3 : Run Migration

In this step we will execute our migration in database using below command

php artisan migrate

This will create table in database and the output

Output: 
Migrating: 2022_02_17_172323_delete_status_movies_table
Migrated:  2022_02_17_172323_delete_status_movies_table (27.20ms)

Screenshot Before:

Screenshot After:

Delete foreign key before deleting column

Sometime we create foreign keys to create the relation in database so if we delete the column without deleting the relation then it produce error so to eliminate this we can delete foreign key first using dropForeign method as below

 public function up()
 {
        Schema::table('movies', function (Blueprint $table) {
           
           $table->dropForeign('statusFk');
           $table->dropColumn('status');
            
        });
 }

Also Read : How to add column in laravel migration ?

Delete foreign key before deleting column

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