Update laravel 5 models with slug

Question

I created a row in my ‘beers’ table called ‘slug’ where i want to store the slug of the name of my beers.the problem is i already have over 1000 beers and I don’t want to manually enter the slug to each one of them so i am trying to make a script to automatically update all the slugs. But i failed to do that:

This is my code to give for every new beer a slug

/**
   * Set the title attribute and automatically the slug
   *
   * @param string $value
   */
  public function setNameAttribute($value)
  {
      $this->attributes['name'] = $value;

      if (! $this->exists) {
          $this->setUniqueSlug($value, '');
      }
  }

/**
   * Recursive routine to set a unique slug
   *
   * @param string $title
   * @param mixed $extra
   */
  protected function setUniqueSlug($name, $extra)
  {
      $slug = str_slug($name.'-'.$extra);

      if (static::whereSlug($slug)->exists()) {
          $this->setUniqueSlug($name, $extra + 1);
          return;
      }

      $this->attributes['slug'] = $slug;
  }

The code works fine, but how can I change all the existing beers in the database with a unique slug. Thanks for your help.

Answer 1

BTW you probably mean you created a COLUMN named 'slug' in the beer table, instead of a ROW.

I would:

Change database definition

If you are using migrations on your app.. maybe an idea:

make the slug column unique tru a migration. So your database will start making comments in the future when you try to add a slug which isn't unique. So your are future-proof on this.

Changing current data

And for changing the current data. If it's a one time only operation, why not use Tinker?

$php artisan tinker;

In tinker, you select all models (or a subset) & run that method on every one. Something like:

$beers = Beer::all();
foreach ($beers as $beer) {
   //do your thingy
   $beer->save()
}

BUT: make sure the code you type is tested on your local and don't use all() on production (but do it in smaller portions)... :-)