Preview Laravel’s migrations with the pretend flag

Here is the command to preview your Laravel migrations without running them:

cd /your/project/root
php artisan migrate --pretend

Laravel’s migrations give us the power to easily version control our database schema creations and updates.

In a recent task at work, I needed to find out why a particular migration was failing.

This is when I discovered the simple but super-useful flag --pretend, which will show you the queries that Laravel will run against your database without actually running those migrations.