How to Rollback Migrations in laravel ?

In our recent article I showed you about creating migration in laravel and sometimes after creating migration we want to rollback migrations so in this article i will show you to rollback migration in laravel. Laravel artisan have multiple options to rollback the migration like we can rollback all migrations, we can rollback last n number of migration using step option and in the same way we can rollback all specific rollback using reset option and refresh options.

In relational databases rollback is a technique to revert back the database operation in previous state. In the same way laravel maintains it migrations in file and database, and we can rollback the operation to its previous state using artisan command.

Here is the simple syntax to rollback migration

php artisan migrate:rollback

Rollback last migrations using step option

We can also rollback last migration using the step option in artisan command, step option accept numeric parameter to rollback last migrations. For example if --step =2 then it means it will rollback last two migrations.

here is the command

php artisan migration:rollback --step=3

Rollback last batch migrations

We can also rollback last batch of migration using the migration rollback command without any options as below

Here is the command

php artisan migration:rollback

Rollback all migrations and reset database

We can also rollback all migration and also can reset the database migration to start point using artisan migration:reset command

Here is the command

php artisan migration:reset

Rollback all and Re run all migrations

refresh option is used to rollback all migration and it runs again migration command to re create the database

Here is the command

php artisan migration:refresh

Let’s understand with an example

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 add_status_movies_table

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

Output: 
Created Migration: 2022_02_15_174050_add_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 add some more columns 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 AddStatusMoviesTable 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 AddStatusMoviesTable and it extends Migration class. AddStatusMoviesTable 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 some more fields to our table before updating the database.

public function up()
{
        Schema::table('movies', function (Blueprint $table) {
             
            $table->integer("status");
            
        });
}

public function down()
{
        Schema::table('movies', function (Blueprint $table) {
             
            $table->dropColumn("status");
            
        });
}

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

Most important thing while rollback is to add the logic of down for rollback here

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_15_174050_add_status_movies_table
Migrated:  2022_02_15_174050_add_status_movies_table (20.08ms)

Step 3 : Run Migration

Now if we want rollback the migration we need to rollback it using artisan command

php artisan migrate:rollback
or
php artisan migrate:rollback --step=1

Also Read : How to rollback a specific migration in laravel ?