Laravel Migrations: How to Rename a Table

• Renaming Tables in Laravel
• Rename the Table Using a New Migration

Renaming Tables in Laravel

Renaming a table in Laravel is a common task that might arise when you're refactoring your database schema. In this post, we'll walk through how to rename a table in Laravel.

Let’s consider we already have the following clients table:

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
 
return new class extends Migration {
    public function up(): void
    {
        Schema::create('clients', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->id();
            $table->string('name');
            $table->string('email')->unique();
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }
 
    public function down(): void
    {
        Schema::dropIfExists('clients');
    }
};

Rename the Table Using a New Migration

To rename the clients table to customers, we need to create a new migration file using make:migration artisan command:

php artisan make:migration rename_clients_table_to_customers_table

Update the new migration file like so:

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
 
return new class extends Migration {
    public function up(): void
    {
        Schema::rename('clients', 'customers');
    }
 
    public function down(): void
    {
        Schema::rename('customers', 'clients');
    }
};

This migration uses Laravel’s built-in Schema::rename() method to rename the table from clients to customers. The down() method ensures you can roll back the change if needed.

Run the migration:

php artisan migrate

The clients table is now renamed to customers.