Laravel 9 Cannot find table - pivot table singular/plural issue

Question

My understanding is that the naming convention for database tables in Laravel is to use plural names for regular tables, and singular names for pivot tables (docs). I have a users table, a locations table, and a location_user table.

When I'm attempting to seed the location_user table, I get an error message that Laravel can't find the location_users (plural) table.

When I first ran into this, I thought I must have the naming convention wrong, so I changed it to 1ocation_users, which allowed it to seed without any issues, but then I got an error from eloquent when trying to access the relationship that seemed to indicate it was looking for the singular version of the table.

NOTE: I'm aware I can name the table whatever I want and pass that into the relationship, but I don't want to do that. I want to have the table names be what the Laravel convention is.

Here's the error:

SQLSTATE[42S02]: Base table or view not found: 1146 Table 'location_users' doesn't exist (SQL: truncate table `location_users`)

I don't have any model relationships defined between the models. I've also verified that my migration was run and the table does exist in the DB:

Here's my table definition:

return new class extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('location_user', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->bigIncrements('id');
            $table->foreignIdFor(Location::class)->constrained();
            $table->foreignIdFor(User::class)->constrained();
            $table->boolean('is_primary')->default(false);
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function down()
    {
        Schema::dropIfExists('location_user');
    }
};

and here's my seeder:

class LocationUserSeeder extends Seeder
{
    /**
     * Run the database seeds.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function run()
    {    
        LocationUser::truncate();

        $locationUser = new LocationUser([
            'location_id' => 1,
            'user_id' => 1,
            'is_primary' => true,
        ]);

        $locationUser->save();

    }
}

Answer 1

Try to set your table name at your model

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\HasFactory;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class LocationUser extends Model
{
    use HasFactory;

    protected $table = 'location_user';
}