How to only use created_at in Laravel
Stefan Izdrail
Founder & Senior Architect · 2026-06-29
In today's world where data is the new gold, managing it efficiently becomes crucial for every developer. The Laravel framework is a great tool that helps us to streamline this process by providing some built-in tools like timestamps. In this comprehensive blog post, we will explore how to manipulate these timestamps to your advantage. With just a few well-placed commands or configuration tweaks, you can customize the field names for created_at and updated_at or even disable timestamps altogether—all while ensuring data integrity.
Customizing Timestamp Field Names
const CREATED_AT = 'created';
const UPDATED_AT = 'updated';
In the Model:
class MyModel extends Model
{
const CREATED_AT = 'created';
const UPDATED_AT = 'updated';
}
Another alternative is to define them within the config/database.php file:
'default' => [
// ... your other configuration values
'timestamps' => true,
'date_formats' => [
'dateFormat' => 'Y-m-d',
'datetypecasts' => true,
'datetimeFormat' => 'Y-m-d H:i:s',
'datetimeutcFormat' => 'U',
'timeFormat' => 'H:i:s',
],
// ... your other configuration values
'custom_timestamps' => [
'created_at' => 'created',
'updated_at' => 'updated',
]
]
Note that it is essential to use the correct case for the constants since Laravel will capitalize them during execution. After defining these constants, you can use them in your model class or queries.
Disabling Timestamps
If you don't need timestamps at all, disable them by setting the$timestamps property to false:
class MyModel extends Model
{
public $timestamps = false;
}
'default' => [
// ... your other configuration values
'timestamps' => true,
'custom_timestamps' => [
'created_at' => 'created',
'updated_at' => 'updated',
]
]
This will prevent Laravel from automatically creating or updating timestamps when saving or updating your model instances. This could be useful if you already have some external system managing these timestamps, and you don't want to duplicate the effort.