Generate Validation Rules from a Database Schema in Laravel

Last updated on November 27th, 2023 by Paul Redmond

Laravel Schema Rules is a package that automatically generates basic Laravel validation rules based on your database table schema. You can use this package as a starting point to quickly create boilerplate rules and optimize as needed.

Given the following schema (from in the README) for your table:

Schema::create('persons', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->id();
    $table->string('first_name', 100);
    $table->string('last_name', 100);
    $table->string('email');
    $table->foreignId('address_id')->constrained();
    $table->text('bio')->nullable();
    $table->enum('gender', ['m', 'f', 'd']);
    $table->date('birth');
    $table->year('graduated');
    $table->float('body_size');
    $table->unsignedTinyInteger('children_count')->nullable();
    $table->integer('account_balance');
    $table->unsignedInteger('net_income');
    $table->boolean('send_newsletter')->nullable();
});

You can run the schema:generate-rules Artisan command to generate validation rules:

$ php artisan schema:generate-rules persons
 
[
    'first_name' => ['required', 'string', 'min:1', 'max:100'],
    'last_name' => ['required', 'string', 'min:1', 'max:100'],
    'email' => ['required', 'string', 'min:1', 'max:255'],
    'address_id' => ['required', 'exists:addresses,id'],
    'bio' => ['nullable', 'string', 'min:1'],
    'gender' => ['required', 'string', 'in:m,f,d'],
    'birth' => ['required', 'date'],
    'graduated' => ['required', 'integer', 'min:1901', 'max:2155'],
    'body_size' => ['required', 'numeric'],
    'children_count' => ['nullable', 'integer', 'min:0', 'max:255'],
    'account_balance' => ['required', 'integer', 'min:-2147483648', 'max:2147483647'],
    'net_income' => ['required', 'integer', 'min:0', 'max:4294967295'],
    'send_newsletter' => ['nullable', 'boolean']
]

You can also target specific columns, skip columns, and even generate a form request class.

There's also an online version of this package that you can use to experiment with this package or use it to manually take a schema and convert it to an array of validation rules: