How to make a Trait in Laravel
Stefan Izdrail
Founder & Senior Architect · 2026-06-29
Title: Efficiently Managing Dates Using Traits in Laravel Models
Introduction
As you might already know, Laravel is an elegant framework built on the Symfony library that simplifies development and encourages best practices. One of its most powerful features is the use of traits to group common functionality that can be shared among classes. In this blog post, we'll learn how to create a trait for formatting dates in your application. We'll cover where to place the file, how to utilize it within your Laravel models, and implement the actual trait with examples.
Creating the Trait File
First things first: let's create a new PHP file named "DatesFormatter.php" inside your app/Traits directory. This will house all our date formatting functionality that can be incorporated into various applications. Note that you may have specific naming conventions for files and directories in your project, so adjust accordingly.
Implementing the Trait
The trait we're building will provide functionality for transforming dates to a custom format as required by our application. This example will handle creating and updating timestamps, along with deleted-at date fields. Here is the content of the "DatesFormatter.php" file:
trait DatesFormatter
{
protected $newDateFormat = 'd.m.Y H:i';
// save the date in UTC format in DB table
public function setCreatedAtAttribute($date){
$this->attributes['created_at'] = Carbon::parse($date);
}
// convert the UTC format to my format
public function getCreatedAtAttribute($date){
return Carbon::parse($date)->format($this->newDateFormat);
}
// save the date in UTC format in DB table
public function setUpdatedAtAttribute($date){
$this->attributes['updated_at'] = Carbon::parse($date);
}
// convert the UTC format to my format
public function getUpdatedAtAttribute($date){
return Carbon::parse($date)->format($this->newDateFormat);
}
// save the date in UTC format in DB table
public function setDeletedAtAttribute($date){
$this->attributes['deleted_at'] = Carbon::parse($date);
}
// convert the UTC format to my format
public function getDeletedAtAttribute($date){
return Carbon::parse($date)->format($this->newDateFormat);
}
}
namespace App\Models;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use DatesFormatter;
class User extends Model
{
use DatesFormatter;
protected $table = 'users';
// other custom model functionality can be added here...
}