Laravel Many to Many relation - laravel-4

Question

I getting started with Eloquent, and I've ran into a problem. I trying to setup a many to many relation schema + model.
Here is the code:
routes.php snippet:
$user1 = User::findOrFail(1);
$user2 = User::where('username', '=', 'TestUser')->get();
// we make $user1 to follow $user2
$user1->followedBy()->save($user2);
User model snippet:
public function followedBy() {
return $this->belongsToMany('User', 'user_follows', 'user_id', 'follow_id');
}
public function following() {
return $this->belongsToMany('User', 'user_follows', 'follow_id', 'user_id' );
}
DB Schema snippet:
Schema::create('user_follows', function(Blueprint $table)
{
$table->increments('id');
$table->integer('user_id');
$table->integer('follow_id');
$table->timestamps();
});
The error I get when I visit the routes:
Argument 1 passed to Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\BelongsToMany::save() must be an instance of Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model, instance of Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection given, called in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/Laravel/proj2/app/routes.php on line 84 and defined

Answer 1

The error says it all:
$user2 = User::where('username', '=', 'TestUser')->get();
// returns Collection
You need this instead:
$user2 = User::where('username', '=', 'TestUser')->first();
// returns single Model
And by the way:
// we make $user1 to follow $user2
$user1->followedBy()->save($user2);
it's $user2 to follow $user1 and use this:
$user1->followedBy()->attach($user2);
For save is saving the $user2 model first, what is redundant here. It's used in such cases:
$user2 = new User;
// assign some properties
...
$user1->followedBy()->save($user2);