Laravel rule for unique excluding blank or null

Question

I have a user model that needs to have unique email addresses but I also want to allow them to be left blank in case the user has no email...I see in docs there is a way to make a rule for unique and an exception for an id...but I'm not sure how to make this allow null or blank but unique if it is not. Sorry seems like this is simple but I can't think of the answer.

public static $adminrules = 
    'email' => 'email|unique:users,email,null,id,email,NOT_EMPTY'                             
);   

Edit It may be that using the rule without required is enough since a blank or null would pass validation in those cases. I might have a related bug that making it so I can't add more than 1 blank email, so I can't verify this.

public static $adminrules = 
    'email' => 'email|unique:users'                             
); 

Answer 1

I tried this. Adding 'nullable' before 'sometimes'.

 $validator = Validator::make($request->all(), [
        'email' => 'nullable|sometimes|unique:users',
    ]);