Dummy data in Laravel

Dummy or fake data generation is an important part of testing database or visualizing data in browser. Laravel being a popular framework has a few ways to create dummy data.

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Now you can manually fill the database for testing but filling up data after every fresh migration is just too slow and you can do better than that. Let’s discuss two ways you might want to create dummy data.

Factory -

This is probably the more famous and used one. Factory uses faker library to generate data. In order to create fake data we have to create a factory of the same model name. Let’s create a factory for a Post model.

First create a post model with migration.

php artisan make:model Post -m

Now add the following in database/migrations/....create_posts_table.php

Schema::create('posts', function (Blueprint $table) {
  $table->id();
  $table->string('title');
  $table->text('body');
  $table->timestamps();
});

And run the migrations

php artisan migrate

Okay. now let’s create PostFactory

php artisan make:factory PostFactory

It will create database/factories/PostFactory.php . The definition method inside it is where we will provide the fake values.

public function definition()
{
  return [
    'title' => $this->faker->sentence(),
    'body' => $this->faker->paragraph(),
  ];
}

The faker library will provide us with fake value of sentence and paragraph. In order create the fake data now we just have to open tinker with php artisan tinker and run in tinker console -

>>> Post::factory()->create()      // run this line only
=> App\Models\Post {#3406
     title: "Sapiente odit sequi dicta est natus quae quo.",
     body: "Et facere veritatis molestias deleniti tempore magni rerum. Odit dolores sit et vel laudantium ut. Distinctio occaecati veritatis vel accusamus eligendi.",
     updated_at: "2021-05-31 11:21:52",
     created_at: "2021-05-31 11:21:52",
     id: 1,
   }

And so your fake data is created and stored in database. To create multiple fake data add count(n) method like so -

>>> Post::factory()->count(10)->create()

Seeding -

This is something I found recently. Creating dummy data by seeding is as easy as it gets. Let’s create a seeder for Post model.

php artisan make:seeder PostSeeder

It will create database/seeders/Postseeder.php . In the run method add fake data as -

public function run()
{
  Post::create([
    'title' => 'lorem ipsum dolor imit',
    'body' => 'Similique molestias exercitationem officia aut. Itaque doloribus et rerum voluptate iure. Unde veniam magni dignissimos expedita eius.',
  ]);
}

In a seeder we provide value for all the required fields. And although it seems like just adding everything yourself, it has some nice advantages which you will see. Also if you already have a factory setup like we do, you can simply use the factory rather than adding all the field data .

public function run()
{
  Post::factory()->create();
}

Now add the PostSeeder to database/seeders/DatabaseSeeder.php

public function run()
{
  $this->call([PostSeeder::class]);
}

In order to store the data in database run -

php artisan db:seed

Your seed data is thus stored in database. To view it you can run Post::get() in php artisan tinker tinker console. After each fresh migration you can add --seed method to run seeder’s as well.

php artisan migrate:fresh --seed

This along with the fact that seeder can be used hand to hand with factory is what makes it so great.

Conclusion -

Both factory and seeder method has their own advantages. Factory method is useful when you don’t need specific data, for eg.- fake users or fake posts etc. Seeder is more useful when your data is specific like if your post or product has a image url associated with it. Then you would want to use seeder even though you have to write more code. Also factory can be used with seeders and you can have your fake data generated every time with fresh migration by adding --seed .

Resources -

• Factory- Official Laravel documentation on factory.
• Seeder- Official Laravel documentation on factory.
• Faker- Faker library official documentation and available formatters.
• github- Github repo of the code.