Question

Essentially, I am having the same issue as this guy, minus the table prefix. Because I have no table prefix, his fix does not work. http://forums.laravel.com/viewtopic.php?id=972

I am trying to build a table using Laravel’s Schema Builder like this:

Schema::create('lessons', function($table)
{
    $table->increments('id');
    $table->string('title')->nullable();
    $table->string('summary')->nullable();
    $table->timestamps();
});

Schema::create('tutorials', function($table)
{
    $table->increments('id');
    $table->integer('author');
    $table->integer('lesson');
    $table->string('title')->nullable();
    $table->string('summary')->nullable();
    $table->string('tagline')->nullable();
    $table->text('content')->nullable();
    $table->text('attachments')->nullable();
    $table->timestamps();
});

Schema::table('tutorials', function($table)
{
    $table->foreign('author')->references('id')->on('users');
    $table->foreign('lesson')->references('id')->on('lessons');
});

The issue is, when I run this code (in a /setup route), I get the following error:

SQLSTATE[HY000]: General error: 1005 Can't create table 'tutorials.#sql-2cff_da' (errno: 150)

SQL: ALTER TABLE `tutorials` ADD CONSTRAINT tutorials_author_foreign FOREIGN KEY (`author`) REFERENCES `users` (`id`)

Bindings: array (
)

Based on posts around the web and the limited documentation available on how to setup Laravel’s Eloquent relationships, I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong…

users already exists and it does have an id field that is auto_increment. I am also setting up my models with the proper relationships (belongs_to and has_many), but as far as I can tell this is not the issue– it’s the database setup. The DB is InnoDB.

What exactly am I doing wrong with the foreign key?

Answer 1

I’m not 100% sure if these are the reasons this is failing but a couple of pointers. If you’re using an older version of mySQL as the database, the default table implementation is myISAM that does not support foreign key restraints. As your scripts are failing on the foreign key assignment, you are better off explicitly stating that you want INNODB as the engine using this syntax in Schema’s create method.

Schema::create('lessons', function($table)
{
    $table->engine = 'InnoDB';

    $table->increments('id');
    $table->string('title')->nullable();
    $table->string('summary')->nullable();
    $table->timestamps();
});

This should hopefully alleviate the problems you are having.

Also, whilst you can declare foreign keys as an afterthought, I create the foreign keys within the initial schema as I can do an easy check to make sure I’ve got the right DB engine set.

Schema::create('tutorials', function($table)
{
    $table->engine = 'InnoDB';

    $table->increments('id');
    $table->integer('author');
    $table->integer('lesson');
    $table->string('title')->nullable();
    $table->string('summary')->nullable();
    $table->string('tagline')->nullable();
    $table->text('content')->nullable();
    $table->text('attachments')->nullable();
    $table->timestamps();

    $table->foreign('author')->references('id')->on('users');
    $table->foreign('lesson')->references('id')->on('lessons');
});

Hope this helps / solves your problem.