Storing Users in a Database

Overview

If you have a large amount of users, or you need to scale horizontally, it may make sense to store them in a database.

From a fresh Statamic project

If you installed Statamic using the statamic new command, or created a project based on the statamic/statamic repo, it will be configured to store users in files.

Statamic comes with an Eloquent driver to make the transition as seamless as possible.

1. Ensure you have a database configured.
2. In config/statamic/users.php, change repository to eloquent.
3. In config/statamic/stache.php, comment out the users store.
4. In config/auth.php, comment out the statamic provider, and uncomment the eloquent provider.
5. Run the php please auth:migration command to generates the migration for the role and user group pivot tables.
6. If you’ve customized your user blueprint, edit the migration so it includes those fields as columns, or create a new migration to add them.
7. Run php artisan migrate
8. Run a command to migrate your file based users into the database.

In an existing Laravel app

If you’ve installed Statamic into an existing Laravel app, it will already be configured to use the Eloquent driver. You will need to run migrations to prepare your database for Statamic’s user and permission setup.

php please auth:migration
php artisan migrate

This will add some columns to the users table (like super, and last_login), and create the role_user and group_user pivot tables.

When using sqlite or mysql as your database driver, make sure to composer require doctrine/dbal. We do change the users table in our auth migrations and therefore require the doctrine/dbal to run the migrations without errors.

This assumes you are happy to use our opinionated setup. If you need something more custom you can create your own user driver.