How to set a default attribute value for a Laravel / Eloquent model?

Question

If I try declaring a property, like this:

public $quantity = 9;

...it doesn't work, because it is not considered an "attribute", but merely a property of the model class. Not only this, but also I am blocking access to the actually real and existent "quantity" attribute.

What should I do, then?

Answer 1

This is what I'm doing now:

protected $defaults = array(
   'quantity' => 9,
);

public function __construct(array $attributes = array())
{
    $this->setRawAttributes($this->defaults, true);
    parent::__construct($attributes);
}

I will suggest this as a PR so we don't need to declare this constructor at every Model, and can easily apply by simply declaring the $defaults array in our models...

---

UPDATE:

As pointed by cmfolio, the actual ANSWER is quite simple:

Just override the $attributes property! Like this:

protected $attributes = array(
   'quantity' => 9,
);

The issue was discussed here.