Customising table names in Cartalyst Sentry

Sentry is a neat little package for authenticating and managing admin users. It is a framework agnostic package but works well with Laravel. The great thing about it is that you can easily extend it to fit your own needs.

I needed to rename a couple of tables - users to admins and users_groups to admins_groups. Here's how I did it.

First, publish Sentry's configuration file:

php artisan config:publish cartalyst/sentry    

We need Sentry to use our custom Eloquent models - AdminUser and AdminGroup in the app/models directory. We'll make these changes in the configuration file.

Go to app/config/packages/cartalyst/sentry/config.php and change the following:

'model' => 'Cartalyst\Sentry\Groups\Eloquent\Group' to 'model' => 'AdminGroup'

'model' => 'Cartalyst\Sentry\Users\Eloquent\User' to 'model' => 'AdminUser'

Then extend Sentry's models and override their properties:

apps/models/AdminUser.php

class AdminUser extends Cartalyst\Sentry\Users\Eloquent\User {

  protected $table = 'admins';

  protected static $groupModel = 'AdminGroup';

  protected static $userGroupsPivot = 'admins_groups';

}

apps/models/AdminGroup.php

class AdminGroup extends Cartalyst\Sentry\Groups\Eloquent\Group {

  protected $table = 'groups';

  protected static $userModel = 'AdminUser';

  protected static $userGroupsPivot = 'admins_groups';
} 

Finally, make sure Sentry's migration files reference the new table names. I simply copied over the migration files from vendor/cartalyst/sentry/src/migrations to app/database/migrations and renamed the tables to admins and admins_groups.

Edit: When seeding the admins_groups table using Sentry's built-in methods, it tried to look for the columns admin_user_id and admin_group_id. For now I've just renamed the columns in the migration file.