What are Eloquent accessors in Laravel?

Eloquent accessors are used to determine how some data is processed when it is being retrieved. They come into play when fetching a database resource. For example, you might want to get the created_at attribute as a human-readable time difference every time you get the user. An accessor should be created for the created_at field to do this. This accessor will then do this conversion every time the model is fetched. So in the database, the column is still a DateTime object but will be returned to you as a human-readable time difference.

Creating an accessor

To create an accessor, create a public function in the model with the following naming conventions:

• The name must start with get.
• Then, the get should be followed by the attribute name in Pascal case. For example, to mutate the created_at attribute, use CreatedAt.
• Finally, it should end with attributes.

Code

Following these rules to create an accessor for the created_at attribute.

• Create a public function named getCreatedAtAttribute in the user model.

public function getCreatedAtAttribute()
{
    return Carbon::parse($this->attributes['created_at'])->diffForHumans();
}

• Now, this sets the model’s created_at to the human-readable version of whatever is in the database.
• Getting a single user will return something like this:

{
    id: 1,
    name: "Miss Ruby Wolff I",
    email: "jessie.lubowitz@example.net",
    username: "white.violette",
    slug: "miss-ruby-wolff-i",
    email_verified_at: "2021-10-21T14:45:41.000000Z",
    created_at: "2 hours ago",
    updated_at: "2021-10-21T14:45:41.000000Z"
}