Why does Laravel 5 auto update my date field?

This Post is old but for anyone who got this problem here is the simplest solution. In your migration the timestamp field just has to be nullable. Than there will no auto update trigger on this field.

$table->timestamp('published_at')->nullable();

No need for using $table->dateTime() instead of $table->timestamp().

It looks like what is happening is that MySQL (or whichever database you are using) is updating the date, not Laravel.

You need to change:

$table->timestamp('published_at');

to:

$table->dateTime('published_at');

Then do a php artisan migrate:refresh to rollback and recreate your tables.