Encrypting and decrypting data

When writing applications that deal with sensitive data, we may often want to encrypt any data that we store in our database. Laravel provides us with a solution to do just that.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we need a standard installation of Laravel, as well as a properly set-up and configured MySQL database.

How to do it...

This is how we'll complete the recipe using the following steps:

1. In the app/config directory, open the app.php file and make sure the key is empty

     'key' => '',

2. In the command line, go to the root of the application and generate a new key using the following command:

     php artisan key:generate

3. Create a table in the database to hold our sensitive information using this following command:

   CREATE TABLE accounts(
     id int(11) unsigned NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
       business varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
       total_revenue varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
       projected_revenue varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
       PRIMARY KEY (id)) 
       ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET...