Model Keys and Indexes
Blueprint supports keys and indexes on your models through the column definition and by leveraging convention.
Within the column definition, you may specify a key or index using the id column type or the foreign, index, or unique column modifiers.
The simplest of these are the index and unique modifiers. Blueprint will generate the necessary code to the migration to add the index. In turn, Laravel will create an index for this column.
The foreign column modifier will also generate the necessary code to create an index on the column. In addition, it will generate code to add the reference and cascade "on delete" constraints.
By default, Blueprint will automatically infer the foreign reference from the column name just as Laravel does. For example, a column name of user_id, would imply a reference to the id column of the users table.
If you are not following Laravel's naming conventions, you may set the attribute on the foreign modifier. Blueprint supports either the foreign table name or the table and column name using dot notation.
For example, all of the following column definitions generate a foreign reference to the id column of the users table.
user_id: id foreign
owner_id: id foreign:users
uid: id foreign:users.id
Finally, while the id column type does not create an explicit index on the database, it does imply a foreign key relationships for the model.
Similar to the foreign column modifier, you may specify an attribute on the id column type. In this case, you specify the foreign model name or the model and column name using dot notation.
id and uuid columns. So it is only necessary to specify foreign when you want to generate constraints. If you always want to generate foreign key constraints, you should enable at the use_constraints configuration option.Composite Indexes
Blueprint also supports adding a composite index. You may do so adding the indexes key to your model definition. This key accepts an array of key/value pairs, where the key is the type of index and the value is a comma separated list of column names.
For example, this will add a unique composite index on the owner_id and the badge_number column of the users table.
User:
indexes:
- unique: owner_id, badge_number