This section explains how to retrieve a user’s followers using the Laravel Followable package. Whether you need to fetch all followers, approved followers, or non-approved followers, this guide will help you implement this functionality with ease.

Retrieving Followers

To get all the users following the current user, simply access the followers attribute. This will return a collection of all followers, which may include both approved and non-approved relationships.

$user->followers;

This will return all followers of the user, including those who have not been approved yet.

Retrieving Approved Followers

To get only the followers that have been approved by the user, use the approvedFollowers method:

$user->approvedFollowers;

This will return only the followers who have been accepted by the user, meaning the follow request has been approved.

Retrieving Non-Approved Followers

If you want to fetch the followers that have not yet been approved by the user, use the notApprovedFollowers method:

$user->notApprovedFollowers;

This collection will contain all follow requests that the user has received but not yet accepted or rejected.

Looping Through Followers

You can loop through the followers to extract more details about each relationship. Here’s how you can get the created_at date (the date the user was followed) and access additional attributes of the follower model (like the user’s nickname).

    foreach ($user->followers()->with('follower')->get() as $follower) {
    // Date when the user was followed
    $follower->created_at;
 
    // Accessing the follower's attributes
    $follower->follower->name;
}