How to solve group by and order by issues in Laravel?

Question

I have a database named maintenance which has a field named cost. I now want to get the sum of costs by month and year and sort them in descending order by month and year. Can anyone help me?

This is what I tried

$MaintenanceStats = Maintenance::oldest()
    ->get()
    ->groupBy(function($val) {
         return Carbon::parse($val->from)->format('F');
     })
     ->take(7);

I got the collection object below and it works fine. But how can I group them by month and year and then sort them in descending order instead of just grouping by month? Also, I only need the total monthly expenses; I don't need all the maintenance records.

Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection {#1517 ▼ // app\Http\Controllers\GeneralController.php:40
  #items: array:5 [▼
    "September" => Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection {#1452 ▶}
    "July" => Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection {#1530 ▶}
    "January" => Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection {#1519 ▶}
    "November" => Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection {#1520 ▶}
    "December" => Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection {#1521 ▶}
  ]
  #escapeWhenCastingToString: false
}

Answer 1

The best way is to use a database query to accomplish this, but you will also need a raw query:

$maintenanceStats = Maintenance::selectRaw("year(`from`) AS year, month(`from`) AS month, sum(cost) AS cost_total")
   ->groupByRaw("year(`from`)")
   ->groupByRaw("month(`from`)")
   ->orderBy('year')
   ->orderBy('month')
   ->get();