How do you do soft deletes?

To implement soft deletes in Laravel, follow these steps:

1. Create a Migration

First, you need to add a deleted_at column to the table you want to use soft deletes with. This can be done by creating a migration:

php artisan make:migration add_deleted_at_to_posts_table --table=posts

In the generated migration file, add the softDeletes method to the up function and dropSoftDeletes to the down function:

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

class AddDeletedAtToPostsTable extends Migration
{
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::table('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->softDeletes();
        });
    }

    public function down()
    {
        Schema::table('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->dropSoftDeletes();
        });
    }
}

Run the migration to add the deleted_at column:

php artisan migrate

2. Use the SoftDeletes Trait

In your Eloquent model, you need to use the SoftDeletes trait. For example, in your Post model:

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\SoftDeletes;

class Post extends Model
{
    use SoftDeletes;

    // Other model properties and methods...
}

3. Soft Deleting Records

You can now soft delete records by calling the delete method on an Eloquent model instance:

$post = Post::find($id);
$post->delete();

This will set the deleted_at timestamp to the current date and time, marking the record as "deleted" without actually removing it from the database.

4. Querying Soft Deleted Records

To retrieve soft-deleted records, you can use the withTrashed method. For example, to retrieve all soft-deleted posts:

$softDeletedPosts = Post::onlyTrashed()->get();

To include both soft-deleted and non-deleted records in your query, use withTrashed:

$allPosts = Post::withTrashed()->get();
```...