What is database seeding in Laravel?

Question

I use Laravel framework and I have recently been informed that there is something named database seeding which produces a fake dataset for our tests. Is my understanding correct?

Well that's pretty much odd. How it works? How it knows which type of data do I need in X column of database? And how it generates it?

Also, Can't I make a seed of my real dataset (something like an export)? You know, I don't know English very well, that's why I cannot understand the concept of seed in database field.

Answer 1

Yes, Laravel comes with the very great & popular package named - Faker. You can write this example, using Faker and generate 10 users like this (inside DatabaseSeeder.php):

use DB;
use Illuminate\Database\Seeder;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

use Faker\Factory as Faker;

class DatabaseSeeder extends Seeder
{
    /**
     * Run the database seeds.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function run()
    {
        $faker = Faker::create();
        foreach (range(1,10) as $index) {
            DB::table('users')->insert([
                'name' => $faker->name,
                'email' => $faker->email,
                'password' => bcrypt('secret'),
            ]);
        }
    }
}

That’s it – $faker->name will generate a random person name, and $faker->email – a random email. After running command php artisan db:seed your database get populated with some random entries.

You can find this package inside your composer.json file under require-dev:

"require-dev": {
    "fzaninotto/faker": "^1.6", // <------- here
    "mockery/mockery": "0.9.*",
    "phpunit/phpunit": "~5.0",
    "symfony/css-selector": "3.1.*",
    "symfony/dom-crawler": "3.1.*",
    "laracasts/testdummy": "~2.0"
},

Faker can generate lots of data, from which some are given below:

$faker->randomDigit;
$faker->numberBetween(1,100);
$faker->word;
$faker->paragraph;
$faker->lastName;
$faker->city;
$faker->year;
$faker->domainName;
$faker->creditCardNumber;

Hope this helps!