Laravel Migration Error: Syntax error or access violation: 1071 Specified key was too long; max key length is 767 bytes

Question

According to the official Laravel 7.x documentation, you can solve this quite easily.

Update your /app/Providers/AppServiceProvider.php to contain:

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

/**
 * Bootstrap any application services.
 *
 * @return void
 */
public function boot()
{
    Schema::defaultStringLength(191);
}

Alternatively, you may enable the innodb_large_prefix option for your database. Refer to your database's documentation for instructions on how to properly enable this option.

I don't know why the above solution and the official solution which is adding

Schema::defaultStringLength(191);

in AppServiceProvider didn't work for me. What worked for was editing the database.php file in config folder. Just edit

'charset' => 'utf8mb4',
'collation' => 'utf8mb4_unicode_ci',

to

'charset' => 'utf8',
'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',

and it should work, although you will be unable to store extended multibyte characters like emoji.

This is an ugly hack and don't do if you want to store string in non english language, emoji

I did it with Laravel 5.7. Hope it helps.

Don't forget to stop and launch again the server.

I'm just adding this answer here as it's the quickest solution for me. Just set the default database engine to 'InnoDB' on

/config/database.php

'mysql' => [
    ...,
    ...,
    'engine' => 'InnoDB',
 ]

then run php artisan config:cache to clear and refresh the configuration cache

EDIT: Answers found here might explain what's behind the scenes of this one

This issue is caused in Laravel 5.4 by the database version.

According to the docs (in the Index Lengths & MySQL / MariaDB section):

Laravel uses the utf8mb4 character set by default, which includes support for storing "emojis" in the database. If you are running a version of MySQL older than the 5.7.7 release or MariaDB older than the 10.2.2 release, you may need to manually configure the default string length generated by migrations in order for MySQL to create indexes for them. You may configure this by calling the Schema::defaultStringLength method within your AppServiceProvider.

In other words, in <ROOT>/app/Providers/AppServiceProvider.php:

// Import Schema
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
// ...

class AppServiceProvider extends ServiceProvider
{

public function boot()
{
    // Add the following line
    Schema::defaultStringLength(191);
}

// ...

}

But as the comment on the other answer says:

Be careful about this solution. If you index email fields for example, stored emails can only have a max length of 191 chars. This is less than the official RFC states.

So the documentation also proposes another solution:

Alternatively, you may enable the innodb_large_prefix option for your database. Refer to your database's documentation for instructions on how to properly enable this option.