Laravel : Migrations & Seeding for production data

Question

My application needs a pre registered data set to work. So i need to insert them in the database when i set up the application.

Laravel propose two mechanisms :

Answer 1

This is what I use in production.

Since I run migration on each deployment

artisan migrate

I create a seeder (just to keep seeding data out of migration for easy access later) and then run that seeder along with the migration

class YourTable extends Migration
{
    /**
     * Run the migrations.
     *
     * @return void
     */
    public function up()
    {    
        //migrate your table // Example
        Schema::create('test_table', function(Blueprint $table)
        {
            $table->increments('id');
            $table->timestamps();
            $table->softDeletes();
        });

        //seed this table
        $seeder = new YourTableSeeder();
        $seeder->run();
    }

    /**
    * Reverse the migrations.
    *
    * @return void
    */
    public function down()
    {
        Schema::drop('test_table');
    }
}

I do not add this seed call to seeds/DatabaseSeeder.php to avoid running it twice on a new installation.