Laravel: Run migrations on another database

If you place database config on the database.php file, this can help you:

php artisan migrate --database=**otherDatabase**

In your app/config/database.php you have to:

<?php
return array(

    'default' => 'mysql',

    'connections' => array(

        # Our primary database connection
        'mysql' => array(
            'driver'    => 'mysql',
            'host'      => 'host1',
            'database'  => 'database1',
            'username'  => 'user1',
            'password'  => 'pass1'
            'charset'   => 'utf8',
            'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
            'prefix'    => '',
        ),

        # Our secondary database connection
        'mysql2' => array(
            'driver'    => 'mysql',
            'host'      => 'host2',
            'database'  => 'database2',
            'username'  => 'user2',
            'password'  => 'pass2'
            'charset'   => 'utf8',
            'collation' => 'utf8_unicode_ci',
            'prefix'    => '',
        ),
    ),
);

Now that you prepared two database connections in your migration you can do:

Schema::connection('mysql2')->create('some_table', function($table)
{
    $table->increments('id');
});

This should work. More infos on: http://fideloper.com/laravel-multiple-database-connections

If you mean using different database connection, it exists in the docs:

Schema::connection('foo')->create('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->bigIncrements('id');
});