laravel4cookbook

E-Commerce 236
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You can learn more about models at: http://laravel.com/docs/eloquent.
Creating Seeders
Having installed Faker; we’re going to use it to populate the database tables with fake data. We do
this for two reasons. Firstly, using fake data is safer than using production data.
Have you ever been writing a script that sends out emails and used some dummy
copy while you’re building it? Ever used some cheeky words in that content? Ever
accidentally sent that email out to 10,000 real customers email addresses? Ever been
fired for losing a company north of £200,000?
I haven’t, but I know a guy that has. Don’t be that guy.
• Phil Sturgeon, Build APIs You Won’t Hate
Secondly, Faker provides random fake data so we get to see what our models look like with random
variable data. This will show us the oft-overlooked field limits and formatting errors that we tend
to miss while using the same set of pre-defined seed data.
Using Faker is easy:
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