A Practical Guide to Eloquent Relationships

Laravel's Eloquent is one of the best ORMs in any language. But relationships trip up newcomers more than anything else.

hasOne vs belongsTo

The model that has the foreign key uses belongsTo.

hasMany

For one-to-many. A User hasMany Posts.

belongsToMany

For many-to-many through a pivot. Posts belongsToMany Tags.

The big tip: name your foreign keys consistently

Stick to {model}_id and Eloquent does most of the work for you.