Laravel Group Query Result by Day/Month/Year

Quick tip for those who want to list some events, grouping them by some date value – by day, month, year etc.

Let’s take a look at example – we have this database structure of appointments.

And we want to list the upcoming appointments for 7 days ahead, grouped by day. Like this:

Ok, so here’s the code:

$days = Appointment::whereBetween('start_time', [now(), now()->addDays(7)])
    ->orderBy('start_time')
    ->get()
    ->groupBy(function ($val) {
        return Carbon::parse($val->start_time)->format('d');
    });

foreach ($days as $day => $appointments) {
    echo '<h2>'.$day.'</h2><ul>';
    foreach ($appointments as $appointment) {
        echo '<li>'.$appointment->start_time.'</li>';
    }
    echo '</ul>';
}

A few explanations here:

1. The main “trick”: you can use Collection result to groupBy any custom logic you want – see groupBy(function ($val) { …
2. Inside of that groupBy we still need to use Carbon::parse(), even if start_time column is within $dates array of the model.
3. Use now() helper to manipulate some dates

That’s it! You can read more about available Collection grouping/manipulating methods in the official documentation, or purchase my course “Eloquent: Expert Level”, where I dedicated one of the sections to Collections.