How to increment or decrement a column value in Laravel?

In Laravel, you can increment or decrement a column value in the database using the increment and decrement methods provided by the Eloquent ORM. These methods allow you to easily update the value of a specific column without writing raw SQL queries. Here’s how you can use them:

Increment a Column Value:

To increment a column value in Laravel, you can use the increment method. This method takes two arguments: the column you want to increment and the value by which you want to increment it. Here’s an example:

// Increment the 'views' column of a Post model by 1
$post = Post::find(1);
$post->increment('views'); // Increment 'views' by 1

You can also specify a custom increment value as the second argument:

// Increment the 'likes' column of a Post model by 5
$post->increment('likes', 5); // Increment 'likes' by 5

Decrement a Column Value:

Similarly, you can decrement a column value using the decrement method. It works in the same way as increment but decreases the value instead. Here’s an example:

// Decrement the 'points' column of a User model by 1
$user = User::find(1);
$user->decrement('points'); // Decrement 'points' by 1

You can also specify a custom decrement value as the second argument:

// Decrement the 'votes' column of a Comment model by 3
$comment->decrement('votes', 3); // Decrement 'votes' by 3

Updating Multiple Columns:

You can also update multiple columns at once by passing an array of column-value pairs to the update method:

$post->update([
    'views' => $post->views + 1,
    'likes' => $post->likes + 5,
]);

In this example, we’re incrementing the ‘views’ column by 1 and the ‘likes’ column by 5.

Remember that these methods work on instances of Eloquent models, so you’ll typically retrieve the model from the database first using methods like find or where before using increment or decrement.

Using these methods is a convenient and safe way to update column values in Laravel without writing raw SQL queries.