Hello artisans, as we know sometimes we may need to create dummy records for our testing purpose. For that purpose, Laravel has a Tinker Support which provide us ability to create dummy records. So, in this article we are going to show how Laravel tinker works. So, no more talking and get to dive into the topic.

Note: Tested on Laravel 8.6.2

Table of Contents

1. Install Laravel and Basic Config
2. Create Factory Class
3. Faker Data Types
4. Generate Dummy Records

Install Laravel and Basic Config

Each Laravel project needs this thing. For that you can see the very beautiful article on this topic from here: Install Laravel and Basic Configurations.

Create Factory Class

Here I will show you the example of creating Student Factory and you will understand its workflow. So, let’s create a Student model first;

php artisan make:model Student -m

App\Models\Student.php

<?php

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\HasFactory;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class Student extends Model
{
    use HasFactory;

    protected $fillable = [
        'name', 'roll', 'class'
    ];
}

configure your migration file

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Migrations\Migration;
use Illuminate\Database\Schema\Blueprint;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\Schema;

class CreateStudentsTable extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {
        Schema::create('students', function (Blueprint $table) {
            $table->id();
            $table->string('name');
            $table->integer('roll');
            $table->integer('class');
            $table->timestamps();
        });
    }

    /**
     * Reverse the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function down()
    {
        Schema::dropIfExists('students');
    }
}

migrate your file using the following command

php artisan migrate

now let’s create our factory class using the following command

php artisan make:factory StudentFactory --model=Student

database\factories\StudentFactory.php

<?php

namespace Database\Factories;

use App\Models\Student;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\Factory;

class StudentFactory extends Factory
{

    protected $model = Student::class;


    public function definition()
    {
        return [
            'name' => $this->faker->name,
            'roll' => $this->faker->randomNumber(),
            'class' => $this->faker->numberBetween(1,9),
        ];
    }
}

Faker Data Types

Using Faker we can generate the following data types:

• Numbers
• Lorem text
• Person i.e. titles, names, gender etc.
• Addresses
• Phone numbers
• Companies
• Text
• DateTime
• Internet i.e. domains, URLs, emails etc.
• User Agants
• Colour
• Images
• Uuid
• Barcodes
• Files

You can get more data types from this GitHub repository.

Generate Dummy Records

Here we are going to create 500 students of different classes with random roll numbers using the following command

php artisan tinker
App\Models\Student::factory()->count(500)->create()

Output:

and you will see the output similar to the following

=> Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Collection {#5464
     all: [
       App\Models\Student {#5465
         name: "Joel Reichel",
         roll: 5363071,
         class: 1,
         updated_at: "2021-10-05 18:23:13",
         created_at: "2021-10-05 18:23:13",
         id: 1,
       },
       App\Models\Student {#5466
         name: "Mrs. Celine Haag",
         roll: 8891328,
         class: 4,
         updated_at: "2021-10-05 18:23:13",
         created_at: "2021-10-05 18:23:13",
         id: 2,
       },
       App\Models\Student {#5463
         name: "Prof. Isaiah Bailey DVM",
         roll: 291994658,
         class: 4,
         updated_at: "2021-10-05 18:23:13",
         created_at: "2021-10-05 18:23:13",
         id: 3,
       },

That’s all. You can download this project from GitHub. Thanks for reading.