php - naming tables in many to many relationships laravel

Question

I concerned about auto naming tables in many-to-many Laravel relationship.

for example:

Schema::create('feature_product', function (Blueprint $table) {}

when change the table name to:

Schema::create('product_feature', function (Blueprint $table) {}

I have an error in my relationship.

What's the matter with product_feature?

Answer 1

Laravel's naming convention for pivot tables is snake_cased model names in alphabetical order separated by an underscore. So, if one model is Feature, and the other model is Product, the pivot table will be feature_product.

You are free to use any table name you want (such as product_feature), but you will then need to specify the name of the pivot table in the relationship. This is done using the second parameter to the belongsToMany() function.

// in Product model
public function features()
{
    return $this->belongsToMany('AppFeature', 'product_feature');
}

// in Feature model
public function products()
{
    return $this->belongsToMany('AppProduct', 'product_feature');
}

You can read more about many to many relationships in the docs.