Factories and Seeders

[SOUND] Welcome back. 0:00 We're making significant progress. 0:02 And now that we've created our models and migrations, 0:04 we're ready to dive into factories and seeders. 0:08 So why do we need to use factories and seeders? 0:11 Imagine you want to add some test data for our API but 0:15 you don't want to manually define all of the individual attributes for 0:19 each model, which can be a tedious development task. 0:24 Instead, we're going to use model factories to generate large amounts of 0:28 database records for each model instance using the powerful Faker library. 0:33 To learn more about factories and seeders, check out the teachers notes below. 0:39 Let's get started. 0:44 The factories, migrations and the seeds folders are inside of the app/database 0:47 directory, where you'll also find the DatabaseSeeder.php file. 0:53 Which we'll populate with to seeders, AuthorsTableSeeder and 0:58 BooksTableSeeder, using two artisan commands like this. 1:02 To test our connection, use the php artisan migrate:fresh command. 1:14 As you can see, we now have two seeders in our seeds directory. 1:22 AuthorsTableSeeder and BooksTableSeeder. 1:27 We're making great progress, and 1:31 we're ready to test our seeders by using the db:seed command, like this. 1:33 If everything went well, you should see a message that reads, 1:45 database seeding completed successfully. 1:49 Also note that they're both empty at the moment, but that's because we 1:52 have not specified values for each column, which we will do later in the course. 1:56 Finally, let's add both seeders to the DatabaseSeeder.php file inside 2:02 of the run function, like this. 2:06 Currently, our seeders are empty because we haven't defined them yet. 2:15 So let's open the UserFactory.php file, which is a default Laravel factory. 2:19 And let's take a look at the defined user factory data inside. 2:26 As you can see, the test data has defined the name, email, 2:30 email_verified_at, password and remember_token attributes, 2:35 which is similar to how we're going to define the author and book factories. 2:42 Let's go ahead and 2:48 delete the userfactory.php file since we won't be using that file in this project. 2:50 Now that we've created the author and book seeders and 2:56 added them to the DatabaseSeeder.php file, 3:00 we're ready to specify some test data for the AuthorTableSeeder and 3:03 BooksTableSeeder files inside of the public run function. 3:08 Inside of the public run function, we'll specify values for each column. 3:13 However, instead of manually specifying the test data for 3:18 each column, we can use model factories and a robust library named Faker. 3:23 Next, let's open the AuthorsTableSeeder.php file to take a look 3:29 at the public run function inside, which, again, is currently empty. 3:34 Inside of the run function, let's add our defined seed data for 3:40 each column in our database tables. 3:45 First, create two factories, the author factory and 3:47 book factory, using these two artisan commands. 3:52 Ctrl+K will clear the terminal, 3:56 php artisan make:factory AuthorFactory. 4:01 And, 4:13 Next, open the AuthorFactory.php file and 4:32 change Model::class to Author::class, and 4:36 modify the import at the top from use App\Model to use App\Author. 4:40 Next, let's open the authors_table migration, so we can define the seed 4:49 data while looking at the database tables side by side, like this. 4:54 Before we move on to defining the book factory, we need to connect the author 5:27 factory to the AuthorsTableSeeder file to create three author instances, like this. 5:32 Next, let's test our AuthorsTableSeeder using the php artisan db:seed command. 5:44 If everything went well, you'd see a message that says, 6:09 database seeding completed successfully. 6:13 And more importantly, 6:16 you'd see that the AuthorsTableSeeder took a little bit longer to complete, 6:17 in my case, 0.5 seconds, but this is because we generated some test data. 6:22 In comparison, the BooksTableSeeder completed in 0 seconds because 6:27 there was no test data to generate. 6:32 Way to go. 6:34 Next, let's apply the same treatment to 6:36 the BookTableSeeder by opening the BookFactory.php file, 6:40 then change Model::Class to Book::class, and 6:46 modify the import at the top from use App\Model to use App\Book. 6:51 Next, let's open the Books table so 6:57 we can define the seed data while looking at the database tables side by side. 7:00 Finally, we need to connect the book factory to the BooksTableSeeder.php file, 7:17 as we did with the AuthorsTableSeeder.php file in the public run function, 7:23 like this. 7:28 To test our work, 7:31 let's use the php artisan migrate fresh command to wipe out the previous data. 7:32 Followed by the php artisan db:seed command to reseed our test data. 7:46 If all went well, you should see messages that look like this. 7:53 Way to go 7:58