How to make relationship between two tables in laravel?

Question

my database has two tables "games" and "teams".

games migration:

$table->unsignedBigInteger('homeTeam');
$table->unsignedBigInteger('awayTeam');
$table->foreign('homeTeam')->references('id')->on('teams')
$table->foreign('awayTeam')->references('id')->on('teams')

what is relationship between this two table? many to many? should I create "game_team" pivot table?

i tried to change the design of the database but it didn't fix it

Answer 1

what you describe is two 1:n relationships. A game has one home team and one away team. You don't need an additional table.

You should use names with _id suffix for foreign keys because laravel models like it that way.

Schema::create('games', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->id();
    // Other game columns
    $table->foreignId('home_team_id');
    $table->foreignId('away_team_id');

    $table->foreign('home_team_id')->references('id')->on('teams');
    $table->foreign('away_team_id')->references('id')->on('teams');
});

In your Game model you can then say

public function home_team(): BelongsTo
{
    $this->belongsTo(Team::class, 'home_team_id');
}

public function away_team(): BelongsTo
{
    $this->belongsTo(Team::class, 'away_team_id');
}

to use it like

$game = \App\Models\Game::first();
$team1 = $game->home_team;  // get the home team
$team2 = $game->away_team;  // get the away team

That is the magic of laravel (eloquent).

Cheers