Laravel migrations change a column type from varchar to longText

It's possible to do with a TABLE migration.

As mentioned in other posts, be sure to run composer require doctrine/dbal from your project root.

These are set up with:

php artisan make:migration alter_table_[yourtablenamehere]_change_[somecolumnname] --table=[yourtablenamehere]

from your project root.

From the Documentation:

https://laravel.com/docs/master/migrations#modifying-columns

class AlterTableSomething extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::table('table', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->text('column_name')->change();
        });
    }
}

You can create a new migration and change just one column type:

public function up()
{
    Schema::table('sometable', function (Blueprint $table) {
        $table->text('text')->change();
    });
}

You need to install doctrine/dbal to make this work

composer require doctrine/dbal

Works with Laravel 5.0+. It does not work with Laravel 4.2.