Laravel - Specify Custom Folders for Migration Files

By default in Laravel you have all migration files in on folder, that called database/migrations/

It's cool, but if your project has grown, you may found this folder includes a lot of files and it's not easy to support them. The best solution is to create sub-directories (according to your needs or per version) and create/put your migrations files in specific directory.

This is the standard way how we use migration files:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Let's try to improve this. For example you may decide to separate migration files according to the version of your script, so the structure of your migration directory will look like this:

 

Looks much better, right? Instead of a long list of migration files.

So when you start new version, you need to create a new directory, name it with the next version number and all migrations, related to this version create only in new directory.

Is this enough? Not really.

But default Laravel waiting you place migration files directly in database/migrations/ directory, not in sub-directories. So we just need to inform Laravel from where it has to take migration files. Let's do it.

We have to open AppServiceProvider.php file, and add in the boot() method following code, that will tell to Laravel from where take migration files.

/*
|--------------------------------------------------------
|  Register custom migration paths
|  We specify sub-directory for each version, like:
|      - database/migrations/0.8.1/
|      - etc.
|  You may use DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR instead of /
|--------------------------------------------------------
*/
$this->loadMigrationsFrom([
  database_path().'/migrations/0.8.1',
  database_path().'/migrations/0.8.2',
  database_path().'/migrations/0.8.3',
]);

Next time you will add a new directory, just remember to update this list of default directories.