Creating a nickname from other columns by migration, laravel 8

Question

I have a table with users, which includes fields for "first name" and "last name" and I need to create a "nick" field during migration and fill them in by creating a string of lowercase letters from the firstname and lastname without spaces.

Unfortunately, I can't find a way to auto-complete this column with other columns.

Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

You need to use a raw query to update the column after it's created that will grab the two columns, concatenate them, and convert them to lowercase.

  Schema::table('users', function(Blueprint $table) {
       $table->string('nick')->nullable();
  });

  DB::query("UPDATE users SET nick = LOWER(CONCAT(first_name, last_name))";