Did you know about orderByRaw() in Eloquent?

Tutorial last revisioned on August 17, 2022 with Laravel 9
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, 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!

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