Laravel - Seeding Relationships

Question

In Laravel, database seeding is generally accomplished through Model factories. So you define a blueprint for your Model using Faker data, and say how many instances you ne

Answer 1

You can do this using closures within the ModelFactory as discussed here.

This solution works cleanly and elegantly with seeders as well.

$factory->define(App\User::class, function (Faker\Generator $faker) {
    return [
        'name' => $faker->name,
        'email' => $faker->email,
        'password' => bcrypt(str_random(10)),
        'remember_token' => str_random(10),
    ];
});

$factory->define(App\Post::class, function (Faker\Generator $faker) {
    return [
        'name' => $faker->name,
        'body' => $faker->paragraph(1),
        'user_id' => function() {
            return factory(App\User::class)->create()->id;
        },
    ];
});

For your seeder, use something simple like this:

//create 10 users
factory(User::class, 10)->create()->each(function ($user) {
    //create 5 posts for each user
    factory(Post::class, 5)->create(['user_id'=>$user->id]);
});

NOTE: This method does not create unneeded entries in the database, instead the passed attributes are assigned BEFORE the creation of associated records.