When it comes to generating dummy data for PHP applications, Faker is the most well-known library. It can be used to generate any type of data, from a number, human name, or city, to a credit card number, username, and 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(), ]); $comment = new Comment(); $comment->body = $faker->paragraphs(1, true); $comment->user_id = $faker->numberBetween(1, 100); $comment->post_id = $faker->numberBetween(1, 50); $comment->save(); $order = new Order(); $order->customer_name = $faker->name(); $order->customer_email = $faker->unique()->email(); $order->total_amount = $faker->randomFloat(2, 50, 500); $order->status = $faker->randomElement(['pending', 'processing', 'shipped']); $order->save(); $product = new Product(); $product->name = $faker->words(3, true); $product->description = $faker->paragraphs(3, true); $product->price = $faker->randomFloat(2, 10, 100); $product->quantity = $faker->numberBetween(1, 100); $product->save();