timestamps in laravel 5.2.7 have default null values

Question

I'm using Laravel Framework version 5.2.7. I cretaed a database migration as shown below:

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;

class CreateLessonsTable extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('lessons', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->increments('id');
            $table->string('title');
            $table->text('body');
            $table->boolean('some_bool');
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function down()
    {
        Schema::drop('lessons');
    }
}

I went in the virtual machine's MySql database and used the command desc lessons;, this is what I'm getting:

I don't understand why do created_at and updated_at colums have NULL as the Default. I went to Laravel 5.2 documentation and saw this:

$table->timestamps(); Adds created_at and updated_at columns. $table->nullableTimestamps(); Same as timestamps(), except allows NULLs.

So according to the documentation $table->timestamps(); should not allow NULL as Default. But still I'm getting created_at and updated_at colums having NULL as the Default. I'm confused. Please HELP!!

Infact these colums shoul be like this table:

Answer 1

If you use $table->timestamp('created_at') instead of $table-timestamps() in your schema builder, default value will be CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and it won't be NULL.

Likewise to store update time of a record: $table->timestamp('updated_at').

The difference is in just a letter 's' and have to mention the column name such as created_at/created, updated_at/updated.

Answer 2

Just as a heads-up, since Laravel 5.2.14 timestamps were made nullable by default.

Blueprint.php:

    /**
     * Add nullable creation and update timestamps to the table.
     *
     * @param  int  $precision
     * @return void
     */
    public function timestamps($precision = 0)
    {
        $this->timestamp('created_at', $precision)->nullable();

        $this->timestamp('updated_at', $precision)->nullable();
    }

The discussion around this can be read on Github.

Taylor Otwell: Personally I think ->timestamps() should just default to ->nullableTimestamps() to solve this issue.

From Github issue https://github.com/laravel/framework/issues/12060#issuecomment-179249086

Changed in commit: Make timestamps nullable by default https://github.com/laravel/framework/commit/720a116897a4cc6780fa22f34d30c5986eafc581