In simple, Migrations are used to create database schemas in Laravel. In migration files, we store which table to create, update or delete.
Each migration file is stored with its timestamp of creation to keep track of the order in which it was created. As migrations go up with your code in GitHub, GitLab, etc, whenever anyone clones your project they can run `PHP artisan migrate` to run those migrations to create the database in their environment. A normal migration file looks like below:
<?php
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
class CreateUsersTable extends Migration
{
/**
* Run the migrations.
*
* @return void
*/
public function up()
{
Schema::create('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
$table->id();
$table->string('name');
// Create other columns
});
}
/**
* Reverse the migrations.
*
* @return void
*/
public function down()
{
Schema::dropIfExists('users');
}
}
The up() method runs when we run `php artisan migrate` and down() method runs when we run `php artisan migrate:rollback`.
If we rollback, it only rolls back the previously run migration.
If we want to rollback all migrations, we can run 'php artisan migrate:reset`.
If we want to rollback and run migrations, we can run `PHP artisan migrate:refresh`, and we can use `PHP artisan migrate:fresh` to drop the tables first and then run migrations from the start.
