Seeders & Model Factories

Why fake data?

When you build an app you constantly need data to look at — a list of products, a page of users, comments under a post. Typing those in by hand through a form is slow and boring, and everyone on your team ends up with a different database. Seeders and factories solve this: they generate realistic fake data automatically.

• A factory is a recipe for making one fake record — for example "a product has a random name and a random price".
• A seeder is a script that runs factories (or inserts fixed rows) to actually fill a table.
• Faker is the built-in library that invents the fake values — real-looking names, sentences, prices, emails.

Step 1 — generate a factory

Artisan creates the factory file for you. This command makes a ProductFactory tied to the Product model:

php artisan make:factory ProductFactory --model=Product

This creates database/factories/ProductFactory.php. The --model=Product part tells Laravel which model the factory builds, so it already knows the table.

Step 2 — describe one fake record

Inside the factory is a definition() method that returns an array — the same shape you would pass to Product::create(). Each value uses $this->faker to invent something realistic:

// database/factories/ProductFactory.php
public function definition(): array
{
    return [
        'name'     => $this->faker->words(2, true),
        'price'    => $this->faker->randomFloat(2, 50, 999),
        'in_stock' => $this->faker->boolean(80),
    ];
}

Reading each line: $this->faker->words(2, true) makes a two-word product name like "silver keyboard". randomFloat(2, 50, 999) makes a price with 2 decimals somewhere between 50 and 999, e.g. 734.20. boolean(80) returns true about 80% of the time, so most products are in stock. Every time this recipe runs it produces different values — that is the point.

Step 3 — write a seeder that uses the factory

A seeder calls the factory and asks for as many records as you want. The run() method is where you do that:

// database/seeders/DatabaseSeeder.php
public function run(): void
{
    Product::factory()->count(50)->create();
}

Product::factory() grabs the factory you wrote, ->count(50) says "make fifty of them", and ->create() saves them all to the database. One line, fifty realistic rows.

Step 4 — run it

Finally you run the seeder from the terminal:

php artisan db:seed                 # run the seeders
php artisan migrate:fresh --seed    # rebuild all tables, then seed

The whole workflow in order:

1. Run php artisan make:factory ProductFactory --model=Product to create the factory file.
2. Fill in definition() with $this->faker values describing one fake record.
3. In DatabaseSeeder’s run() method, call Product::factory()->count(50)->create().
4. Run php artisan db:seed (or migrate:fresh --seed to rebuild and reseed).
5. Refresh your app — it is now full of realistic data to work with.