Eloquent date to int.

I will assume that by converting to int you mean getting the unix timestamp.

$timestamp = $user->created_at->timestamp

created_at and updated_at are automatically converted to Carbon instances by Eloquent. See Carbon as a DateTime on steroids [ https://github.com/briannesbitt/Carbon ].

If you need other fields in your model to be treated like that by Eloquent take a look in the docs [ http://laravel.com/docs/5.0/eloquent#date-mutators ]. Basically you should override the getDates(...) method

public function getDates()
{
    return ['created_at', 'my_date'];
}