0000-00-00 as date in Laravel

Question

I have to build a Laravel application on an existing (old) database. This database uses 0000-00-00 as default dates. There is no way I can change this because the current system (which will also be kept) uses this to check if something is active for an infinite amount of time (for example: active_from 0000-00-00 & active_till 0000-00-00 means it's always active).

I want to add a column to an existing table, so I created a migration: add_columnname_to_tablename_table. In the up() function I did: $table->string('columnname'). When I run the migration, I get:

SQLSTATE[22007]: Invalid datetime format: 1292 Incorrect datetime value: '0000-00-00 00:00:00' for column active_from at row 1.

The old system is too big to make any changes to this -- and I'm not allowed to change it.

Is there any way to make Laravel accept 0000-00-00 as a valid date(time)?

Answer 1

Laravel uses strict mode by default, I have fixed this by changing strict => true in config/database.php to strict => false.

Answer 2

strtotime will return a number below zero when the date is invalid such as common in MySQL 0000-00-00 00:00:00. Make sure you pass an object type date or carbon:

  return strtotime(date or carbon object) < 0 ? null : date