Soft Delete in Laravel

Soft deleting allows you to mark models as “deleted” without actually removing them from the database. It works by adding a deleted_at column, which stores the timestamp of when an entry is deleted.

The major advantage of soft deletes is that you don’t lose data permanently — deleted entries can always be restored later.

Laravel also provides a mechanism to clean up older soft deleted records, which I’ll explain later.

How to Set Up Soft Deletes

Configuring soft deletes in Laravel is straightforward. There are two key steps:

1. Modify your migration
First, you need to add a column for soft deletes in your migration file. After running the migration, a deleted_at column will be added to your table (e.g., posts).

public function up()
{
    Schema::table('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->softDeletes();
    });
}

To remove the column during rollback, use the dropSoftDeletes() method in the down() function.

public function down()
{
    Schema::table('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->dropSoftDeletes();
    });
}

2. Update your model
Next, in your model, import the SoftDeletes trait to enable soft delete functionality.