Removing column from database in Laravel 5+

I've a blog for which the articles table Schema is defined like this:

public function up()
{
    Schema::create('articles', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->increments('id');
        $table->integer('user_id')->unsigned();
        $table->string('title');
        $table->string('thumb')->nullable();
        $table->text('excerpt');
        $table->text('body');
        $table->string('slug')->unique();
        $table->integer('comment_count')->unsigned()->default(0);
        $table->integer('view_count')->unsigned()->default(0);
        $table->timestamps();
        $table->softDeletes();
}

public function down()
{
    Schema::drop('articles');
}

I want to drop the columns comment_count and view_count without losing existing data in the table

I defined a new migration like this:

class RemoveCommentViewCount extends Migration
{
    public function up()
    {
        //nothing here
    }

    public function down()
    {
        Schema::table('articles', function($table) {
           $table->dropColumn('comment_count');
           $table->dropColumn('view_count');
       });
   }
}

and I did php artisan migrate . It did migrate successfully, but the two columns are not dropped.

What am I doing wrong? How can I drop those columns without losing the existing data in the table?

Your migration must look like this:

 Class RemoveCommentViewCount extends Migration
  {
      public function up()
      {
          Schema::table('articles', function($table) {
             $table->dropColumn('comment_count');
             $table->dropColumn('view_count');
          });
      }

      public function down()
      {
          Schema::table('articles', function($table) {
             $table->integer('comment_count');
             $table->integer('view_count');
          });
      }
  }

The dropColumn in the up method, because with new migration you want to delete this columns. If you make a rollback, you have another time the two columns

Even you can drop the multiple columns in a single line by passing the array column to dropColumn function.

class RemoveCommentViewCount extends Migration
{
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::table('articles', function($table) {
            $table->dropColumn(['comment_count', 'view_count']);
        });
    }

    public function down()
    {
        Schema::table('articles', function($table) {
            $table->integer('comment_count');
            $table->integer('view_count');
        });
    }
}

In case you have a foreign key constraint, then drop first the foreign key index association and then can pass the column to dropColumn function with others like following.

public function up()
{
    Schema::table('customer_orders', function($table) {
        $table->dropForeign(['product_id']);
        $table->dropForeign(['shipping_address_id']);
        $table->dropColumn(['product_id', 'shipping_address_id', 'column1', 'column2']);
    });
}

Removing column from database in Laravel 5+

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