What is a Factory?

A Factory in Laravel is a feature that allows you to easily create fake (dummy) data for your application models.

It is mainly used for:

• Seeding databases with testing/demo data
• Testing (Unit/Feature tests need fake data)
• Prototyping quickly

Create Factory

Employee.php

namespace App\Models;

use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\HasFactory; // 👈 Import

class Employee extends Model
{
    use HasFactory;  // 👈 Add this line
    protected $fillable = ['name','email','email_verified_at','password','remember_token'];
}

Use this command to generate a factory file:

php artisan make:factory EmployeeFactory --model=Employee

This generates a file in database/factories/:

use Illuminate\Support\Str;

class EmployeeFactory extends Factory
{
    public function definition(): array
    {
        return [
            'name' => $this->faker->name(),
            'email' => $this->faker->unique()->safeEmail(),
            'email_verified_at' => now(),
            'password' => bcrypt('password'),
            'remember_token' => Str::random(10),
        ];
    }
}

Using Factories

1. Create Single Record

Employee::factory()->create();

Create one random data column in emoployees table

2. Create Multiple Records

Employee::factory()->count(10)->create();

3. Make Without Saving

Employee::factory()->make(); // returns instance but not saved

Factory Types

Laravel doesn’t have "types" officially, but based on use cases, we can group:

1. Basic Factory – simple fields with Faker.
2. State Factory – define variations of data.
3. Relationship Factory – with belongsTo, hasMany, etc.

State Factories

Used for defining different conditions of a model.

class EmployeeFactory extends Factory
{
    public function definition(): array
    {
        return [
            'name' => $this->faker->name(),
            'email' => $this->faker->unique()->safeEmail(),
            'email_verified_at' => now(),
            'password' => bcrypt('password'),
            'remember_token' => Str::random(10),
        ];
    }
    public function admin()
    {
        return $this->state(fn () => [
            'email' => 'admin@gmail.com',
        ]);
    }
    public function guest()
    {
        return $this->state(fn () => [
            'email' => 'admin@gmail.com',
        ]);
    }
}

Condition based run function

Employee::factory()->admin()->create();
Employee::factory()->guest()->create();

Relationships in Factories

1. One To One

User::factory()
  ->has(Profile::factory()) 
  ->create();

2. One To Many

User::factory()
    ->has(Post::factory()->count(5)) 
    ->create();

3. Many To Many

User::factory()
    ->hasAttached(Role::factory()->count(3)) 
    ->create();

4. Polymorphic

Example: Comment model morphs to Post or Video.

Comment::factory()->for(Post::factory(), 'commentable')->create();