Developing in Laravel 5.7, using a MySQL database. On a couple of my database columns I have the type of enum - didn't do my research and made the enum full of numbers (0-2, or 0-3). After reading the pros and cons, I want to move away from enums and convert them to tinyints.

What's the best way to change the type of the column in my table to tinyint and convert the strings '0','1','2','3' to tinyint?

I don't really want to lose my data in the process.

<https://laravel.com/docs/5.7/migrations#modifying-columns> has information about modifying columns, however it does not support enums:

Only the following column types can be "changed": bigInteger, binary, boolean, date, dateTime, dateTimeTz, decimal, integer, json, longText, mediumText, smallInteger, string, text, time, unsignedBigInteger, unsignedInteger and unsignedSmallInteger.