Trouble with Laravel Eloquent relationships and eager loading returning null in PHP 8.1
I'm stuck on something that should probably be simple. I'm sure I'm missing something obvious here, but While working on a Laravel application, I encountered a puzzling issue with Eloquent relationships. I have a `Post` model that has a one-to-many relationship with a `Comment` model. The intention is to load comments eagerly to improve performance and reduce the number of queries executed. Here’s a snippet of my `Post` model: ```php class Post extends Model { public function comments() { return $this->hasMany(Comment::class); } } ``` In my controller, I tried to fetch the posts along with their comments: ```php $posts = Post::with('comments')->get(); ``` However, the `comments` relationship returns `null` for all posts, even when I know there are comments associated with them. I verified that the foreign key in the `comments` table (`post_id`) is correctly set and matches the `id` in the `posts` table. To further debug, I ran: ```php $posts = Post::all(); foreach ($posts as $post) { dd($post->comments); } ``` To my surprise, the output shows that `$post->comments` is an empty collection for posts that do have comments in the database. I’ve double-checked the database records and confirmed that the relationships are set up correctly. Additionally, I tried clearing the application cache using `php artisan cache:clear`, but that didn’t resolve the issue. Is there something I might be missing in terms of eager loading, or is there a deeper configuration issue within my Laravel setup? Any insights or troubleshooting tips would be greatly appreciated. My development environment is Ubuntu. What am I doing wrong? My development environment is Linux. What's the best practice here?