How to name a pivot table in many-to-many in Laravel

The default naming convention of Laravel many-to-many pivot table is xxxxx_yyyyy, where "xxxxx" and "yyyyy" are names of related tables, in singular form, in alphabetical order.

Example: pivot table between users and locations should be called location_user.

The wrong names would be location_users (because it's not singular) or user_location (because "user" and "location" is not in alphabetical order).

If you follow those naming conventions, you can define the belongsToMany relation without extra parameters:

app/Models/User.php

public function locations()
{
return $this->belongsToMany(Location::class);
}

If you name this table differently, you need to pass its name as a second parameter:

public function locations()
{
return $this->belongsToMany(Location::class, 'users_locations');
}
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Why the following does not work?

Table 1: businesses

Table 2: business_tags

Pivot Table: business_business_tag

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Probably Laravel misinterprets some repeating word differenly, not sure.

You can specify that table as the second parameter in your pivot function in the Model.

Or, if I were you, I would rename tables differently, it's quite confusing.

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@Pablo It's because Laravel sucks when it comes to tables with 2 words in them. I struggled with this for a long time. Who knows what the magic does behind the scenes, while the documentation never has a 2 word table name, like they don't friggen exist!

Do laravel devs join the words?? Do they just name their table "businesstags"??

What I end up doing is minimizing the magic, and just specifying the table names in all relationships (belongsTo etc.), and at the top of all my model classes $table = "..."

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