Disable Laravel's Eloquent timestamps

I'm in the process of converting one of our web applications from CodeIgniter to Laravel. However at this moment we don't want to add the updated_at / created_at fields to all of our tables as we have a logging class that does all this in more depth for us already.

I'm aware I can set $timestamps = false; in:

Vendor\laravel\framework\src\illuminate\Datebase\Eloquent\Model.php

However I'd rather not change a core file for Laravel, or have everyone of my models have that at the top. Is there any way to disable this elsewhere for all models?

You either have to declare public $timestamps = false; in every model, or create a BaseModel, define it there, and have all your models extend it instead of eloquent. Just bare in mind pivot tables MUST have timestamps if you're using Eloquent.

Update: Note that timestamps are no longer REQUIRED in pivot tables after Laravel v3.

Update: You can also disable timestamps by removing $table->timestamps() from your migration.

Simply place this line in your Model:

public $timestamps = false;

And that's it!

Example:

<?php

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Post extends Model
{
    public $timestamps = false;

    //
}

To disable timestamps for one operation (e.g. in a controller):

$post->content = 'Your content'; 
$post->timestamps = false; // Will not modify the timestamps on save
$post->save();

To disable timestamps for all of your Models, create a new BaseModel file:

<?php

namespace App;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class BaseModel extends Model
{
    public $timestamps = false;

    //
}

Then extend each one of your Models with the BaseModel, like so:

<?php

namespace App;

class Post extends BaseModel
{
    //
}

If you are using 5.5.x:

const UPDATED_AT = null;

And for 'created_at' field, you can use:

const CREATED_AT = null;

Make sure you are on the newest version. (This was broken in Laravel 5.5.0 and fixed again in 5.5.5).

If you only need to only to disable updating updated_at just add this method to your model.

public function setUpdatedAtAttribute($value)
{
    // to Disable updated_at
}

This will override the parent setUpdatedAtAttribute() method. created_at will work as usual. Same way you can write a method to disable updating created_at only.

In case you want to remove timestamps from existing model, as mentioned before, place this in your Model:

public $timestamps = false;

Also create a migration with following code in the up() method and run it:

Schema::table('your_model_table', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->dropTimestamps();
});

You can use $table->timestamps() in your down() method to allow rolling back.

Disable Laravel's Eloquent timestamps

Related

Recent Posts