Tinkerwell Shorts: Using the new whereExists method in Laravel 10

Laravel 10 makes writing whereExists queries in Laravel applications much easier. Previously, it the whereExists relation required a custom query within a closure but luckily, Laravel 10 solves this in a better way with a much higher developer UX.

In our licensing platform at beyondco.de, we manage licenses of multiple products. If we want to list all orders that include a Tinkerwell license, we would need to write an Eloquent like this:

Order::whereExists(function ($query) {
  $query->from('licenses')->whereColumn('licenses.order_id', 'orders.id');
})->count();
)->count();

Laravel 10 makes that a lot easier by simply taking the License model and doing the heavy lifting on it's own:

Order::whereExists(
  License::whereColumn('licenses.order_id', 'orders.id');
)->count();

This looks cleaner and is easier to understand – which is all we care about when we talk about developer UX.