Eloquent: how to make a copy of a row

Today I want to tell you about one “hidden” Laravel feature which is in the system but not in documentation – replicate. This function allows you to make a copy of a row in the fastest way possible.

To start with, we are going to have a table:

Schema::create('tasks', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->increments('id');
    $table->string('task');
    $table->text('description');
    $table->timestamps();
    $table->softDeletes();
});

And a model:

class Tasks extends Model
{
    use SoftDeletes;
    protected $table = 'tasks';
    protected $fillable = ['task', 'description'];
}

In the database we have a task which looks like this:

And then we run the following code to duplicate a single row:

$tasks = Tasks::find(1);
$newTask = $tasks->replicate();
$newTask->save();

We should see that our database row was replicated with new id and updated timestamps:

And that’s it! With a few lines of code you can replicate a lot of data. This method works with loops too, so you can use this method to duplicate all of our entries.