How does laravel/lumen dateformat 'U' actually works?

Question

I'm not able get the timestamps with dateformat 'U' working in lumen.

In migration:

        $table->timestamps();

In Model:

protected $dateFormat = 'U';

protected $dates = [
    'created_at',
    'updated_at',
    'deleted_at'
];

public function getDateFormat()
{
    return 'U';
}

Insert row from controller:

    $model = new ApiKey;
    $model->random= rand();
    $model->name = $name;
    $model->scope = $scope;
    $model->save();

It does insert the row in the database but with 0000-00-00 00:00:00 values for created_at and updated_at columns.

Also, while retrieving a model via toArray or toJson it thrown exception:

I want lumen to autoupdate the timestamps and retrive timestamps as unixtimestamp format i.e. number of seconds from 1st Jan 1970.

Also, $table->timestamps() didn't create deleted_at column. What do I need to do get this column created via laravel.

Is there any other option than $table->timestamp('deleted_at');?

I've found a solution bay changing timestamps columns to int. But I want the things to be done in laravel way.

Answer 1

Unix timestamps are integers, not compatible with SQL datetime/timestamp fields. If you want to use unix timestamps, use integer field types for storage.

The timestamps() method only creates created_at and updated_at, soft deletes are not enabled by default. This method should not be used if you want integer storage.

---

If you only want to change the output format when serializing data, use casting:

/**
 * The attributes that should be cast to native types.
 *
 * @var array
 */
protected $casts = [
    'created_at' => 'datetime:U',
];