Migrations & Schema
Modifying migrations
Once a migration file has left your development environment and is in the master branch, it must never be modified as the risk that it has been cloned by another developer or deployed to production means changes could break other environments.
Until that time, feel free to modify the migration as much as required.
Forward-rolling migrations
When generating migration files, they will contain both an up method and a down method.
The down method must not be used and should be removed. Reversing migrations will lead to data loss and most times this is not desirable, particularly if you have already captured user input.
In the event that a migration must be modified or removed, create a new migration that performs the necessary changes, allowing you to continue rolling forward only.
When developing, make use of the migrate:fresh command. This will reset your entire database and rerun all migrations, ensuring that they always function. This is preferred over relying on down methods and the migrate:rollback command.
TIP
Re-running all migrations with migrate:fresh gives the added bonus of ensuring that all of your migrations can be executed from start to finish at all times.
enum columns
Do not use enum columns. Due to a limitation in the underlying doctrine/dbal library, it is not possible to use the schema tooling to modify a table's fields (using $field->change()) if it contains an enum column. In part, this is due to the way that an enum column maps state, which the underlying library does not support.
If you find yourself reaching for an enum, consider doing so in code. As you are likely to map enum values to class constants in some way in order to avoid passing strings through your application, you can use the myclabs/php-enum package.
TIP
You should use enumerables only when you have a small number of choices that are not likely to change often.
Should you have many values, or values that need to be modified by your application's users, you must use an appropriate database solution i.e. as has many or many to many relationship.