Laravel: Different column names with different users table name

To change the table, you can do this on your model.

protected $table = 'q_users';

To change the primary key, you can do this: protected $primaryKey = 'qID' ;

To change the other fields like email, name, password, you can write a migration to rename the columns in the users table. It would look like the following:

Schema::table('users', function (Blueprint $table) {
    $table->renameColumn('name', 'qName');
    $table->renameColumn('email', 'qEmail');
    $table->renameColumn('password', 'qPassword'); 
});

Before you can do that, make sure you have the doctrine/dbal package installed. You can install it by doing the following:

composer require doctrine/dbal

Changing the email and password field can have a lot of repurcussions on Laravel's authentication system and notification system. You need to do couple of changes.

In your App\Http\Controllers\Auth\LoginController, you need to add the following method which will override the one in the AuthenticateUsers trait.

/**
 * Get the login username to be used by the controller.
 *
 * @return string
 */
public function username()
{
    return 'qEmail';
}

You also need to add the following method:

/**
 * Get the password for the user.
 *
 * @return string
 */
public function getAuthPassword()
{
    return $this->qPassword;
}

... and that should make the Login works well with your new fields.

Changing the email will also probably break the Password Reset Email workflow. You would need to override the following method in your User model.

/**
 * Get the e-mail address where password reset links are sent.
 *
 * @return string
 */
public function getEmailForPasswordReset()
{
    return $this->qEmail;
}

I am not entirely sure how you can override the Verification workflow, but it looks like you would need to do changes here:

/**
 * Determine if the user has verified their email address.
 *
 * @return bool
 */
public function hasVerifiedEmail()
{
    return ! is_null($this->qEmailVerifiedAt);
}

/**
 * Mark the given user's email as verified.
 *
 * @return bool
 */
public function markEmailAsVerified()
{
    return $this->forceFill([
        'qEmailVerifiedAt' => $this->freshTimestamp(),
    ])->save();
}

/**
 * Send the email verification notification.
 *
 * @return void
 */
public function sendEmailVerificationNotification()
{
    // You probably need to override with your own notification here
    // which would pull your actual email
    $this->notify(new Notifications\VerifyEmail);
}

All in all, this is a tough decision to make. I am not sure why you want to do that. However, since you want to do it, there's a simpler (although still not recommended way) to ensure everything works well with your new fields.

You can define Accessors to your modified fields. For example, you can add the following accessors in your User model.

public function getNameAttribute($value)
{
    return $this->qName; 
}

public function getEmailAttribute($value)
{
    return $this->qEmail; 
}

public function getEmailVerifiedAtAttributes($value)
{
    return $this->qEmailVerifiedAt; 
}

... and that should make it work. Any calls to $user->email will actually pull the value from $user->qEmail. Although, like I said, I wouldn't personally recommend it.

Edit: Based on your comments, if you want to change the field name in the login form, you would also need to change the validation logic. So in your LoginController you would also need to override these methods.

/**
 * Validate the user login request.
 *
 * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
 * @return void
 */
protected function validateLogin(Request $request)
{
    $this->validate($request, [
        $this->username() => 'required|string',
        'qPassword' => 'required|string',
    ]);
}

/**
 * Get the needed authorization credentials from the request.
 *
 * @param  \Illuminate\Http\Request  $request
 * @return array
 */
protected function credentials(Request $request)
{
    return $request->only($this->username(), 'qPassword');
}