Laravel Query Builder: Get All Records from Table

Introduction

Laravel, the popular PHP framework for web artisan, comes with an elegant database query builder which is convenient for database operations. It provides a more expressive and clean syntax while also preventing SQL injection vulnerabilities. In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to retrieve all records from a database table using Laravel’s query builder.

Setting Up the Environment

Before diving into the query builder, make sure you have the following prerequisites in place:

• Composer: Ensure Composer is installed on your machine as we will use it to install Laravel.
• Laravel Project: You should have a running Laravel project. You can create one by running composer create-project --prefer-dist laravel/laravel blog.
• Database: Set up a database and connect it to your Laravel project by altering the .env file with your database credentials.

Basic Query to Retrieve All Records

$users = DB::table('users')->get();

This will get all the records from the users table. Remember to import the DB facade at the beginning of your file:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;

Using Eloquent Models

If you’d prefer to use Eloquent ORM, which is the object-relational mapper included with Laravel, then you can define a model and use the following code:

$users = User::all();

Iterating Results

Retrieving all records is only part of the operation. Next, you might want to do something with the resultant Collection:

foreach ($users as $user) {
    echo $user->name;
}

This piece of code will list all of the user names in the users table.

Limiting Fields

Sometimes you may only want to get specific fields:

$user_emails = DB::table('users')->pluck('email');

Filtering Records

In case you need to apply conditions to your retrieval process, Laravel’s query builder allows you to chain methods:

$active_users = DB::table('users')->where('active', 1)->get();

Advanced Query Building

Laravel’s query builder also allows for more advanced queries such as joins, eager loading of relationships, aggregate functions, and more. It’s important to learn about these to make full use of what Laravel offers.

You can explore left joins:

$users = DB::table('users')
    ->leftJoin('posts', 'users.id', '=', 'posts.user_id')
    ->get();

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we’ve explored the fundamental ways of retrieving all records from a table using Laravel’s query builder and Eloquent ORM. The power and elegance of Laravel’s database querying capabilities lie in their simplicity and the seamless integration with the framework’s ORM. Use these tools effectively to build more robust and feature-rich web applications with cleaner and safer database operations.

Leverage the full potential of the Laravel framework by delving into other aspects such as migrations, middleware, and collections to augment your back-end development lifecycle.