I've just tried out v5.1, and got the infamous ERR1071 while doing a artisan migrate, right after laravel new. I can't find out a good solution to it, yet. Because table charset is utf8mb4, and the email column is varchar(255), creating a unique on it will definitely cause error. I can't find out a way to specify the key length while calling

$table->string('email')->unique();

from the 2014_10_12_000000_create_users_table.php file.

After a little digging, it seems that we'll have to modify several index related functions in the Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint class, and eventually (maybe not), the Illuminate\Support\Fluent.

Any hint?