Add Faker to Laravel for Dummy Data

When it comes to generating dummy data for PHP application, Faker is the most well-known library. It can be used to generate any types of data, from a number, human’s name, city, to credit card number, username, password.

I wrote a post about using Faker in CodeIgniter. There are some steps to follow to use Faker. However, we don’t need those steps applied to Laravel, the framework (v5.0+) already has Faker built-in.

To test some functions of the Faker library you just need to create a Faker object and return data from some methods from your web routes file .

Add library

use Faker\Factory as Faker;

Test function in web route

Route::get('/dummy',function(){
	$faker = Faker::create();
	echo 'Email Address: ' . $faker->unique()->email;
});

Insert data

$faker = Faker::create();
DB::table('account')->insert([
	'username' => $faker->userName(),
	'password' => $faker->password(),
	'about' => $faker->sentence(),	
	'created_at' => \Carbon\Carbon::now(),
	'Updated_at' => \Carbon\Carbon::now(),
]);