Can't set dates

The date field (which is deprecated and not a standard anymore according to W3C) takes the date in the format you wrote: "yyyy-MM-dd". Carbon::now() outputs a full datetime value, like "2016-03-23 16:52:00.000".

You can use

Carbon::now()->toDateString();

which will output "2016-03-23".

But since you use a datetime field in your database, you'll need to use a datetime-local field.

When the launch date is null, I get:

$product->launch_date->toDateString(); -0001-11-30

Where does that come from?!

This is indeed strange.

I tried to create empty/null instances of Carbon, but it always gave me correct dates:

$date = null
$dt = Carbon::parse($date);

Carbon\Carbon {#717
    +"date": "2016-03-24 09:52:01.000000",
    +"timezone_type": 3,
    +"timezone": "Europe/Berlin",
}

$date2 = ''
$dt2 = Carbon::parse($date2);
Carbon\Carbon {#719
    +"date": "2016-03-24 09:53:23.000000",
    +"timezone_type": 3,
    +"timezone": "Europe/Berlin",
}

What is the output of $product->launch_date without some Carbon/Date method? I guess they won't be null, because if they were, you would get a FatalErrorException:

Call to a member function toDateString() on null

It's something to do with MySQL:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29917598/why-does-0000-00-00-000000-return-0001-11-30-000000

The thread states that it is a PHP issue.

But your invalid date must come from somewhere - when your launch_date is '0000-00-00 00:00:00', you definetly did something wrong - either in database design or in your inserts.

And to be honest, the lack of information you provided (where does the data come from, ...) makes it hard to find the problem's issue.

It comes from here:

Schema::table('products', function($table)
{
    $table->timestamp('launch_date');
});

I get -0001-11-30 when the field is null. I explained this in my first post.

I have now set the field to allow nulls, this should prevent MySQl sticking an actual date in.

I still get the same error, when I try and turn the collection into an array.