Using a UUID in a Laravel Eloquent model

One of the things I really love about Laravel is how easy it is to customize it to your own wishes.

Recently I was working on a model that used a standard auto-incrementing integer as its primary key. My task was to convert this model to work with a version 4 UUID.

Making the change

It was actually quite simple, there are just a few protected attributes you have to change on the Eloquent model(s), as can be seen in this code sample:

class Article extends Model
{
    // column name of key
    protected $primaryKey = 'uuid';

    // type of key
    protected $keyType = 'string';

    // whether the key is automatically incremented or not
    public $incrementing = false;
}

What does this do?

This change will make some frequently used Eloquent methods as they did before. For example Article::find() can now be called using the UUID. The same is true for findMany, findOrFail and firstOrNew.

Authentication with an Eloquent user model will now also work as you would expect it. This should not come as a surprise as authenticated uses the same Eloquent methods as we mentioned before. Still, it is very nice we don’t need to make any further changes to get this to work.

What does not automatically work?

Not everything will automatically work as it did before. The best example I’ve come across is model route binding. Depending on whether you use implicit or explicit model binding you will need to make different changes, which are clearly stated in the docs.

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