How do I get database column names in Laravel?

New Answer

At the time I gave this answer Laravel hadn’t a way to do this directly, but now you can just:

$columns = Schema::getColumnListing('users');

Old Answer

Using attributes won’t work because if you do

$model = new ModelName;

You have no attributes set to that model and you’ll get nothing.

Then there is still no real option for that, so I had to go down to the database level and this is my BaseModel:

<?php

class BaseModel extends \Eloquent {

    public function getAllColumnsNames()
    {
        switch (DB::connection()->getConfig('driver')) {
            case 'pgsql':
                $query = "SELECT column_name FROM information_schema.columns WHERE table_name="".$this->table.""";
                $column_name="column_name";
                $reverse = true;
                break;

            case 'mysql':
                $query = 'SHOW COLUMNS FROM '.$this->table;
                $column_name="Field";
                $reverse = false;
                break;

            case 'sqlsrv':
                $parts = explode('.', $this->table);
                $num = (count($parts) - 1);
                $table = $parts[$num];
                $query = "SELECT column_name FROM ".DB::connection()->getConfig('database').".INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE TABLE_NAME = N'".$table."'";
                $column_name="column_name";
                $reverse = false;
                break;

            default: 
                $error="Database driver not supported: ".DB::connection()->getConfig('driver');
                throw new Exception($error);
                break;
        }

        $columns = array();

        foreach(DB::select($query) as $column)
        {
            $columns[] = $column->$column_name;
        }

        if($reverse)
        {
            $columns = array_reverse($columns);
        }

        return $columns;
    }

}

Use it doing:

$model = User::find(1);

dd( $model->getAllColumnsNames() );