To cast a datetime column to a Carbon instance, you can specify the column name on the protected $casts property from your model class. Imagine your model has a "published_at" column with a datetime type, you can cast it by defining it like below.
<?php
protected $casts = [
'published_at' => 'datetime'
];Once you have defined it, you will be able to call all of the Carbon helpful methods such as formatting the datetime value, adding, subtracting, getting human-readable value and etc.
<?php
$post = Post::first()->published_at;
dd($post->format('d M y')); // 26 Jun 21
dd($post->diffForHumans()); // 1 day ago
