[laravel] First Or Create

I know using:

User::firstOrCreate(array('name' => $input['name'], 'email' => $input['email'], 'password' => $input['password']));

Checks whether the user exists first, if not it creates it, but how does it check? Does it check on all the params provided or is there a way to specifiy a specific param, e.g. can I just check that the email address exists, and not the name - as two users may have the same name but their email address needs to be unique.

firstOrCreate() checks for all the arguments to be present before it finds a match.

If you only want to check on a specific field, then use firstOrCreate(['field_name' => 'value']) like

$user = User::firstOrCreate([
    'email' => '[email protected]'
], [
    'firstName' => 'abcd',
    'lastName' => 'efgh',
    'veristyName'=>'xyz',
]);

Then it check only the email

An update:

As of Laravel 5.3 doing this in a single step is possible; the firstOrCreate method now accepts an optional second array as an argument.

The first array argument is the array on which the fields/values are matched, and the second array is the additional fields to use in the creation of the model if no match is found via matching the fields/values in the first array:

See documentation

Previous answer is obsolete. It's possible to achieve in one step since Laravel 5.3, firstOrCreate now has second parameter values, which is being used for new record, but not for search

$user = User::firstOrCreate([
    'email' => '[email protected]'
], [
    'firstName' => 'Taylor',
    'lastName' => 'Otwell'
]);