Laravel 5.* - Eloquent Many to Many Relationships - php

Question

I have the following tables
USERS = username | email | name
FOLLOWERS = user_id | follower_id
When a logged-in user clicks on "follow" my code saves his id inside followers.follower_id, and the id of user who he wants to follow is saved inside followers.user_id.
To see how many followers a user has and how many users a user is following I use:
$followers = Follower::where('user_id', $user->id)->count();
$following = Follower::where('follower_id', $user->id)->count();
This works well, but I would like to show information about the followers of one user. I've tried the following:
$first_follower = $followers[0]->user->username;
But it return the user followed not the follower.
I am wondering how I can get information about the follower
User Model
protected $fillable = ['username','email','name'];
public function follow() {
return $this->hasMany('Shop\Follower');
}
Follower Model
protected $fillable = ['user_id','follower_id'];
public function user() {
return $this->belongsTo('Shop\User');
}

Answer 1

An example how you should implement relations, is above. It's many users to many users thru followers table. You probably dont need a follower model, cause you already have a user model. Your code will work after some analyze and enhancements, but i will highly recomend you to make something like this inuser model instead:
public function followers()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('App\User','followers','user_id','follower_id');
}
public function following_users()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('App\User','followers','follower_id','user_id');
}
Than you can access a followers $user->followers (this will return eloquent collection and you will be able to do whatever you want with this according to laravel docs collection api) and a certain one like $user->followers[0]
Hope i get your answer rigth.

Answer 2

If I get this right the followers are instances of the User class/model, so you don't need a Follower model. You can just define a Many To Many Relationship
In your User model you can add:
public function followers()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('Shop\User', 'followers', 'user_id ', 'follower_id');
}
public function following()
{
return $this->belongsToMany('Shop\User', 'followers', 'follower_id', 'user_id');
}
Than you can access the user followers just by $user->followers which will return a Laravel Collection and with $user->following you can access the ones that the user is following.
//Get the count of all followers for $user
$count = $user->followers()->count();
//Get the count of all followed by $user
$count = $user->following()->count();
//Get the username of the first follower
$follower = $user->followers()->first();
echo $follower->username;
//Loop trough all followers
foreach ($user->followers as $follower) {
echo $follower->username;
}
Defining this relation can help you save/delete followers just by using the attach() and detach() methods
// The $user will be followed by an user with $followerId
// A record in the `followers` table will be created with
// user_id = $user->id and follower_id = $followerId
$user->followers()->attach($followerId);
// The $user will stop be followed by an user with $followerId
$user->followers()->detach($followerId);
A side note:
There is a difference between calling the followers() method and calling the followers property. The first will return BelongsToMany relation and you can call all the Eloquent query builder method on it and the later will return a Collection
/** #var Illuminate\Support\Collection */
$user->followers;
/** #var Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\BelongsToMany */
$user->followers();