I was shocked by the result when I attempted to get the post count of each user using the withCount method and then specified the columns I needed. So, lemme present the code that I wrote in this case:

use App\Models\User;

User::withCount('posts')
    ->select(['name', 'id'])
    ->get();

The previous code delivered a null value of the `posts_count` attribute and when I dumped the query I found that the `select` method overrides the result of the `withCount` method:

use App\Models\User;

User::withCount('posts')
    ->select(['name', 'id'])
    ->toSql();

The triggered query against the database was:

select `name`, `id` from `users`

As illustrated in the query that no place for the `posts_count` so, I have made a little change to fix that issue:

use App\Models\User;

User::select(['name', 'id'])
    ->withCount('posts')
    ->get();

This change will execute a different query against the database:

select `name`, `id`, (select count(*) from `posts` where `users`.`id` = `posts`.`user_id`) as `posts_count` from `users`

Boom..we got a hit 🏒