Laravel migration with SQLite 'Cannot add a NOT NULL column with default value NULL'

Question

Why am I getting this warning when using the SQLite driver? I have no problems with the MySQL driver but SQLite is throwing this error.

It does not make sense to me

Answer 1

All the folks solutions are good, but I wanted to find a reusable and readable way to do this, so I made a trait and hope it can help you remove some boilerplate codes out of your migrations.

The method is $this->databaseDriverIs("driver_name_here");.

Here is how I use it in a typical table creation migration:

<?php

use App\Traits\WithDatabaseDriver;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;

class CreateCountryTable extends Migration
{
  use WithDatabaseDriver;

  public function up()
  {
    Schema::create("country", function (Blueprint $table) {
      $table->increments("id");
      $table->string("name");

      $table->unique("name", "unique_country_name");
    });

    Schema::table("continent", function (Blueprint $table) {
      $column = $table->unsignedInteger("countryId");

      // This is where we apply the "fix" if 
      // the driver is SQLite
      if ($this->databaseDriverIs("sqlite")) {
        $column->nullable();
      }

      $table->foreign("countryId")->references("id")->on("country");
    });
  }

  public function down()
  {
    Schema::dropIfExists("country");
  }
}

And this is the trait that does all the job:

<?php

namespace App\Traits;

trait WithDatabaseDriver
{
  /**
   * @var string
   */
  private $driver;

  public function __construct()
  {
    $this->driver = config("database.default");
  }

  public function databaseDriverIs(string $driver): bool
  {
    return $this->driver === $driver;
  }
}

Answer 2

I'm not familiar with Laravel, but apparently the use of the after method to specify the order of columns appears to specifically mention ONLY MySQL (Laravel) and a discussion (GitHub) seems to point to difficulties in it's use with SQLite. It may likely be incompatible because its function: "...use the after method to specify the order of columns" design runs up against the limitation in SQLite's documentation (SQLite) for adding columns... which reads: "The new column is always appended to the end of the list of existing columns." I can't say whether assigning default values with ->default($value) can get you by or not.