Test User Data (Fake Data)

jamtoday picture jamtoday · Jan 4, 2009 · Viewed 80.8k times · Source

Where can I get, or how can I generate a large formatted collection of fake user data (names, email address, locations, etc.) that can be used for testing an application?

It can be clearly fake, this will be limited to the development server. But I'm sure anything would be better than what I could come up with.

Answer

Lance Fisher picture Lance Fisher · Jan 4, 2009

There are some tools built just for this. I've used http://www.generatedata.com/ before to generate data for MySql databases. RedGate has a nice tool to fill your SQL Server database with test data called SQL Data Generator. The RedGate tool costs about $300, but there is a free trial.

UPDATE: Faker.js is now available. It is a project built on node.js, and looks pretty comprehensive.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mockaroo is great!

If you'd like an HTTP API of fake user data, check out Random User Generator