Updating Column Types with Laravel's Schema Builder

Laravel makes database migrations very easy with its Schema Builder. It has a lot of built-in methods to add tables, columns, indexes, etc. However, it's easy to forget that you can do so much more with just plain old SQL queries.

I needed to change the type of a column from VARCHAR to TEXT. Here's what I ran in a migration file:

public function up()
{
    DB::statement('ALTER TABLE flavours MODIFY COLUMN description TEXT');
}

public function down()
{
    DB::statement('ALTER TABLE flavours MODIFY COLUMN description VARCHAR(255)');
}