Optionally skip running migrations in Laravel with the new ‘shouldRun’ method

Note: if you're reading this before release day, this might not yet be live on a Laravel 12 release JUST yet.

A week or so ago, I contributed something to Laravel i’ve wanted for a while - a way to skip running migrations unless a certain criteria is met.

For us, this means that we can ship new feature code to production, but not neccessarily run potentially breaking migrations in production unless a feature flag is enabled before deployment, or keep certain migrations that only run on development/local/staging environments for holding debugging information etc.

The new shouldRun method

When you generate a migration, you can now optionally include this method:

public function shouldRun(): bool
{
	return true;
}

If the value is false, it will SKIP the migration when you run php artisan migrate or any similar command, INCLUDING php artisan migrate:rollback.

Some sample use cases for this might include:

Only run a migration when a feature flag is enabled.

You could leverage Laravel Pennant to determine if a migration should run - depending on the status of a feature flag.

public function shouldRun(): bool
{
	return Feature::active(MyFeature::class);
}

Only run certain migrations in local, staging, or production.

You can choose to only run certain migrations in certain environments:

public function shouldRun(): bool
{
	// Only run this in a local environment
	return app()->environment('local');
}

Or only in non-production environments:

public function shouldRun(): bool
{
	// Only run this in any non-production environment
	return ! app()->environment('production');
}

...And many more. If you end up using this - let me know, it always makes me happy when I can see something i've contributed being useful to others.