Laravel migrations

 

Interview answer

Migrations are version-controlled database schema changes. They allow developers to create, modify, and roll back database structures consistently across environments.

Code

php artisan make:migration create_products_table
php artisan migrate
php artisan migrate:rollback

Example:

Schema::create('products', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->id();
    $table->string('name');
    $table->decimal('price', 10, 2);
    $table->timestamps();
});

Adding a column:

Schema::table('products', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->unsignedInteger('stock')->default(0);
});

Scenario

Suppose five developers work on the same project. Instead of manually modifying everyone's database, each schema change is committed as a migration. CI/CD can then execute:

php artisan migrate --force

This makes database changes reproducible.