Update Enum Column Doctrine Exception in Laravel

I have a predilection for using enum column types in my Laravel projects. I don't abuse them but I turn to them often when I have a well-defined range of possible values.

One of the disadvantages of using the enum column type in Laravel migrations - it turns out - is that you can't easily perform a migration on a table that contains an enum column. So it's not even a matter of changing the enum column itself, merely the presence of an enum column in a table will screw things up when trying to execute the migration.

In my scenario, I wanted to create a new migration in my Laravel 5.8 project to update a colum from string to text. The table in question contained an enum column.

When I ran the migration, I got the following error:

Doctrine\DBAL\DBALException  : Unknown database type enum requested, 
Doctrine\DBAL\Platforms\MySQL57Platform may not support it.

After some research I came upon this answer on Stack Overflow which clears things up a little.

Laravel's documentation does mention that in order to do this you first need to composer require doctrine/dbal.

Following that, my solution became this:

?php

use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;

class UpdateWidgetNameWidgetsTable extends Migration
{
    public function up()
    {
        $this->registerEnumWithDoctrine();

        Schema::table('widgets', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->text('widget_name')->nullable()->change();
        });
    }

    public function down()
    {
        $this->registerEnumWithDoctrine();

        Schema::table('widgets', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->string('widget_name')->nullable()->change();
        });
    }

    private function registerEnumWithDoctrine()
    {
        DB::getDoctrineSchemaManager()
            ->getDatabasePlatform()
            ->registerDoctrineTypeMapping('enum', 'string');
    }
}

Basically you need to register and map the enum type to string with Doctrine, using this snippet:

DB::getDoctrineSchemaManager()->getDatabasePlatform()->registerDoctrineTypeMapping('enum', 'string');

Admittedly, the registerEnumWithDoctrine function should probably reside in the global scope but I think it's fine for the purpose of this example.