How to make a many-to-many relationship of a model to itself in Laravel?

Question

Laravel

Hello.
I want, for example, to make the "Add to friends" option, and for this I need a many-to-many relationship in the User model, but to myself, right?
What is usually done in such cases?
Thank you.

Answer 1

We do hasMany with User on the user's friends table

public function friends(){
        return $this->hasMany('App\Models\Friend, 'user_id', 'id');
    }

Make 2 ids in this table:
Who adds to friends (Auth:id()) field user_id
Whom the user adds to friends - field friend_id
As a result, using the create method, we make an entry when adding to friends. If the user is added as a friend, the same is true.
we get

$user->friends()->get()
$user->friends()->find($id)