Michael Dyrynda has a new post to his site showing the Laravel users out there how to share a database between your applications. In his case one of the applications is a legacy app and the other is a newer Laravel application.

As a contractor, I had a sanitised copy of the database, and I managed to reverse engineer the Eloquent models from the database schema, creating factories along the way, in order to be able to write tests for the members application.

In late 2017, we started migrating our CRM to Laravel as well, in order to modernise the code base a bit, give it a standard structure, and make it easy to make changes to it moving forward. Now that we had two Laravel applications, we started looking at how best to share data between them.

He starts by talking about reverse engineering the models from the database structure and the use of migrations to manage the database schema. In the end he created a stand-alone tool, Nomad, that helps to keep things in sync between the two databases. He includes examples of it in use and how it helped to keep the database in sync despite permissions issues and connection problems. He also mentions how they used it to take care of some testing issues, database configuration changes and how to use it in a continuous integration pipeline.