[SOUND] Welcome back.

We're making significant progress.

And now that we've created our models and migrations,

we're ready to dive into factories and seeders.

So why do we need to use factories and seeders?

Imagine you want to add some test data for our API but

you don't want to manually define all of the individual attributes for

each model, which can be a tedious development task.

Instead, we're going to use model factories to generate large amounts of

database records for each model instance using the powerful Faker library.

To learn more about factories and seeders, check out the teachers notes below.

Let's get started.

The factories, migrations and the seeds folders are inside of the app/database

directory, where you'll also find the DatabaseSeeder.php file.

Which we'll populate with to seeders, AuthorsTableSeeder and

BooksTableSeeder, using two artisan commands like this.

To test our connection, use the php artisan migrate:fresh command.

As you can see, we now have two seeders in our seeds directory.

AuthorsTableSeeder and BooksTableSeeder.

We're making great progress, and

we're ready to test our seeders by using the db:seed command, like this.

If everything went well, you should see a message that reads,

database seeding completed successfully.

Also note that they're both empty at the moment, but that's because we

have not specified values for each column, which we will do later in the course.

Finally, let's add both seeders to the DatabaseSeeder.php file inside

of the run function, like this.

Currently, our seeders are empty because we haven't defined them yet.

So let's open the UserFactory.php file, which is a default Laravel factory.

And let's take a look at the defined user factory data inside.

As you can see, the test data has defined the name, email,

email_verified_at, password and remember_token attributes,

which is similar to how we're going to define the author and book factories.

Let's go ahead and

delete the userfactory.php file since we won't be using that file in this project.

Now that we've created the author and book seeders and

added them to the DatabaseSeeder.php file,

we're ready to specify some test data for the AuthorTableSeeder and

BooksTableSeeder files inside of the public run function.

Inside of the public run function, we'll specify values for each column.

However, instead of manually specifying the test data for

each column, we can use model factories and a robust library named Faker.

Next, let's open the AuthorsTableSeeder.php file to take a look

at the public run function inside, which, again, is currently empty.

Inside of the run function, let's add our defined seed data for

each column in our database tables.

First, create two factories, the author factory and

book factory, using these two artisan commands.

Ctrl+K will clear the terminal,

php artisan make:factory AuthorFactory.

And,

Next, open the AuthorFactory.php file and

change Model::class to Author::class, and

modify the import at the top from use App\Model to use App\Author.

Next, let's open the authors_table migration, so we can define the seed

data while looking at the database tables side by side, like this.

Before we move on to defining the book factory, we need to connect the author

factory to the AuthorsTableSeeder file to create three author instances, like this.

Next, let's test our AuthorsTableSeeder using the php artisan db:seed command.

If everything went well, you'd see a message that says,

database sitting completed successfully.

And more importantly,

you'd see that the AuthorsTableSeeder took a little bit longer to complete,

in my case, 0.5 seconds, but this is because we generated some test data.

In comparison, the BooksTableSeeder completed in 0 seconds because

there was no test data to generate.

Way to go.

Next, let's apply the same treatment to

the BookTableSeeder by opening the BookFactory.php file,

then change Model::Class to Book::class, and

modify the import at the top from use App\Model to use App\Book.

Next, let's open the Books table so

we can define the seed data while looking at the database tables side by side.

Finally, we need to connect the book factory to the BooksTableSeeder.php file,

as we did with the AuthorsTableSeeder.php file in the public run function,

like this.

To test our work,

let's use the php artisan migrate fresh command to wipe out the previous data.

Followed by the php artisan db:seed command to reseed our test data.

If all went well, you should see messages that look like this.

Way to go