The Pineco.de blog has a new tutorial posted that the Laravel users out there will find particularly useful. In their latest post, they introduce some basic Eloquent searching techniques that can be used to easily locate data via currently available Eloquent functionality.

When our app is smaller – for example at the beginning – it’s enough to apply small, handmade solutions. It’s true for database searching as well. It’s not necessary to pull in a package instantly. Most of the time we can use some simple techniques to perform searches in Eloquent.

[...] Searching is a vital part of any application. A good interface helps the user to retrieve the information it needs. So it’s essential to bring a good solution both on front-end and back-end. In this post, we are not covering any UI or front-end related topics. [...] So for now, let’s talk about MySQL and Eloquent only.

In the post, they share a few methods for searching data that don't require any additional service or package. They're mostly just taking advantage of features the MySQL database supports but they're showing how to use them in a Laravel environment:

• simple "where" clauses
• using the fuzzy matching of the "like" keyword
• searching JSON columns by a "path"
• using "sounds like" to find similar values

Each item on the list comes with a few lines of code showing how to use it via an Eloquent model and a brief explanation of what's happening behind the scenes in the database.