Getting raw SQL performed by laravel 4 migrations

Question

I'm working in an environment where rather than deploying changes directly to the clients servers I have to generate a build tarball with a changelist from an SVN revision and send it over to their web team.

The problem is that I'm not allowed anything fancy, only changes to the site assets and raw queries, this means I can't ask the client to run laravel migrations when I need them to make a change to their staging & live databases (and I don't trust migrations enough for live anyway.) I won't have access to the live database directly either.

So what I want to be able to do is capture the raw SQL when a migration is run, from there I can see exactly what's changing and I can tell the client "here's an SQL file of what needs to change, review it an run it when you apply the update."

Answer 1

As an alternative solution that doesn't require setting up any event listeners, you can use the --pretend option when running the command:

php artisan migrate --pretend

This will dump SQL queries that would be run by the migration, but without actually running the migration. It will output on each line the class name of the migration and query being run from that migration, so for a migration that creates a users table with a unique email column, you'll get something like this:

CreateUsersTable: create table `users` (`id` int unsigned not null auto_increment primary key, `email` varchar(255) not null, `password` varchar(60) not null, `created_at` timestamp default 0 not null, `updated_at` timestamp default 0 not null) default character set utf8 collate utf8_unicode_ci
CreateUsersTable: alter table `users` add unique users_email_unique(`email`)

This option is present since Laravel 4 up to the newest version of Laravel (which at the time I'm posting this answer is 5.1).

Answer 2

If you add this to the beginning of your Routes.php file - it will dump all SQL that is run by Laravel:

Event::listen('illuminate.query', function($sql)
{
    var_dump($sql);
}); 

So do that, then run php artisan migrate - and all the SQL is dumped.

You could then just log the SQL to a file or something instead of doing a var_dump - the possibilities are endless...