Did you know about orderByRaw() in Eloquent?

Let’s imagine a simple situation – you need to write an Eloquent query and order the result by the difference of two columns. Or some other calculation. Time to apply a raw query!

Simple orderBy:

User::where('created_at', '>', '2016-01-01')
  ->orderBy('updated_at', 'desc')
  ->get();

Now, what if we need to order by the difference between updated_at and created_at? It looks like this:

User::where('created_at', '>', '2016-01-01')
  ->orderByRaw('(updated_at - created_at) desc')
  ->get();

This orderByRaw() method, which is not mentioned in official Laravel documentation, will apply order by clause without changing anything in it, so final query will be:

select * from users 
  where created_at > '2016-01-01' 
  order by (updated_at - created_at) desc

Hope that helps!