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[SOUND] Welcome back.

Now that we've covered routing, controllers and views,

let's talk about the final element, models.

Models are the direct connection between the database and the Laravel application.

In a perfect world, models will directly mirror the structure of your database.

That is to say, each database table corresponds to a model.

The user model interacts with the user table, and so on.

Let's take a look at how we can connect our Laravel application to the database.

To start connecting our database, we need to delete the default migrations in

the Database forward slash Migrations directory.

Then create a model using the php artisan make model course -m command.

The dash m flag tells Laravel to create a migration for us,

which really speeds up development and course is the name for the model.

After we create the model and migration, we need to update the current default

migration schema in the database forward slash migrations directory.

This is what the default schema looks like.

As you can see, the default schema is very minimal and

does not contain the data types we will need for our application.

Let's take a look at the completed Laravel app.

And each of the data types that we need to add to our default schema.

As you can see, we have a title, summary, duration, language,

and difficulty displayed for each course in our library.

Next, let's add new fields for our tables in order for our application

to handle the new data types such as string, integer and long text.

In the data base facade, you will see each data type represented such as the title,

followed by a summary of long text as well as an integer for duration,

a string for language in difficulty and another integer for number of stages.

Let's modify the default schema inside of the database forward slash

migrations directory and the file that ends with create courses tables.php.

Once inside of this file,

modify the public function named up using the project files like this.

With the updated schema, our app will be able to migrate and

see the correct data with very little effort on our part.

If you're not familiar with the up and down functions,

check the teachers notes below for more information about migration class methods.

Now that we've set up our database, we'll give our app control of the database and

its structure by using migrations, which we'll cover in an upcoming video.

And the next section, we'll explore Laravel's built in

PHP tool Tinker to quickly read data from our database.

See you in the next section.