php - Find or Create with Eloquent

Question

I have recently started working with Laravel and Eloquent, and was wondering about the lack of a find or create option for models. You could always write, for example:

$user = User::find($id);
if (!$user) {
    $user = new User;
}

However, is there not a better way to find or create? It seems trivial in the example, but for more complex situations it would be really helpfully to either get an existing record and update it or create a new one.

Answer 1

Below is the original accepted answer for: Laravel-4

There is already a method findOrFail available in Laravel and when this method is used it throws ModelNotFoundException on fail but in your case you can do it by creating a method in your model, for example, if you have a User model then you just put this function in the model

// Put this in any model and use
// Modelname::findOrCreate($id);
public static function findOrCreate($id)
{
    $obj = static::find($id);
    return $obj ?: new static;
}

From your controller, you can use

$user =  User::findOrCreate(5);
$user->first_name = 'John';
$user->last_name = 'Doe';
$user->save();

If a user with id of 5 exists, then it'll be updated, otherwise a new user will be created but the id will be last_user_id + 1 (auto incremented).

This is another way to do the same thing:

public function scopeFindOrCreate($query, $id)
{
    $obj = $query->find($id);
    return $obj ?: new static;
}

Instead of creating a static method, you can use a scope in the Model, so the method in the Model will be scopeMethodName and call Model::methodName(), same as you did in the static method, for example

$user =  User::findOrCreate(5);

Update:

The firstOrCreate is available in Laravel 5x, the answer is too old and it was given for Laravel-4.0 in 2013.

In Laravel 5.3, the firstOrCreate method has the following declaration:

public function firstOrCreate(array $attributes, array $values = [])

Which means you can use it like this:

User::firstOrCreate(['email' => $email], ['name' => $name]);

User's existence will be only checked via email, but when created, the new record will save both email and name.

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