Laravel 3 Schema Table Column Collation

Question

I'm learning laravel, and I'm stuck on a simple process. I want the tables to be generated as UTF-8 but varchar and text fields are like latin-1.

Schema section in guide did not help at all. I found this GitHub entry but it does not work neither (throws me errors).

I have a schema like this:

<?php

class Create_Authors_Table {

    /**
     * Make changes to the database.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('authors',function($table){
         //$table->charset('utf8'); //does not work
         //$table->collate('utf8_general_ci'); //does not work

         $table->increments('id');
         $table->string('name')->charset('utf8'); //adding ->collate('utf8_general_ci') does not work
         $table->text('bio')->charset('utf8');
         $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

    /**
     * Revert the changes to the database.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function down()
    {
        Schema::drop('authors');
    }

}

This is the SQL output:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `authors` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `name` varchar(200) NOT NULL,
  `bio` text NOT NULL,
  `created_at` datetime NOT NULL,
  `updated_at` datetime NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 AUTO_INCREMENT=1 ;

But this is what I need:

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `authors` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `name` varchar(200) NOT NULL,
  `bio` text NOT NULL,
  `created_at` datetime NOT NULL,
  `updated_at` datetime NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;

I even put collation key to my application/config/database.php

'mysql' => array(
    'driver'   => 'mysql',
    'host'     => '',
    'database' => '',
    'username' => '',
    'password' => '',
    'charset'  => 'utf8',
    'collation'=> 'utf8_unicode_ci', //this line was not there out of the box, googling provided me this
    'prefix'   => '',
),

What am I missing, how do I fix this?

Thanks,

Answer 1

Just solved it, (using mysql 5.5 (5.5.29)) with Linux Mint 13 Mate (based on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS)

I added these lines on /etc/mysqld/my.cnf

[client]
default-character-set = utf8

[mysqld]
init_connect='SET collation_connection = utf8_unicode_ci'
character-set-server = utf8
collation-server = utf8_unicode_ci

This way, SQL queries worked on shell as it should, but on laravel or phpmyadmin etc, they didn't work. So I did this:

I opened /etc/apache2/conf.d/charset and removed the ; from this line:

AddDefaultCharset UTF-8

Then I restarted apache2 and mysql, now it works as it should.

Later Edit: That GitHub Core Hack works like a treat. I ended up doing it.