Eloquent date filtering: whereDate() and other methods

Let's say you want to filter out entries created today. You have a timestamp field created_at, right? How do you filter the DATE only from that timestamp? Apparently, Taylor thought about it.

I've seen people doing it with raw queries, like this:

$q->where(DB::raw("DATE(created_at) = '".date('Y-m-d')."'"));

Or without raw queries by datetime, like this:

$q->where('created_at', '>=', date('Y-m-d').' 00:00:00'));

Luckily, Laravel Query Builder offers a more Eloquent solution:

$q->whereDate('created_at', '=', date('Y-m-d'));

Or, of course, instead of PHP date() you can use Carbon:

$q->whereDate('created_at', '=', Carbon::today()->toDateString());

Wait, there's more

It's not only whereDate. There are four more useful functions to filter out dates:

$q->whereDay('created_at', '=', date('d'));
$q->whereMonth('created_at', '=', date('m'));
$q->whereYear('created_at', '=', date('Y'));
$q->whereTime('created_at', '=', date('H:m:s'));

Isn't it nice and easy?

The only thing is if you're dealing with timezones, you should totally use Carbon and make some more complex queries, but that's a topic for a whole another article.

Video version

You can watch how it works - in my video WhereX Magic Methods for Fields and Dates.

It's a lesson from my 2-hour online-course Eloquent: Expert Level.