Dummy Laravel Package

Getting Started

kerns/dummy is a dev-only generator for lorem ipsum copy and placeholder images. Install it as a dev dependency and let Laravel 12/13 package discovery register the provider:

composer require --dev kerns/dummy
php artisan vendor:publish --tag=dummy-assets

First things to check before writing any code:

1. PHP version — v2.0.0 requires PHP 8.3–8.5. If your app or CI image is on 8.2, this is the one thing that will block you.
2. GD extension — required for image generation. php -m | grep -i gd locally, and make sure your Dockerfile has docker-php-ext-install gd.
3. Published assets — without the dummy-assets tag publish, image examples will 404 in Blade.
4. The hosted demo — https://kerns.github.io/dummy/ is the fastest way to discover syntax (including the image options, which the README covers better than the release notes do).

First use case: fill a seeder or factory with realistic-length copy instead of fake()->text():

// database/factories/PostFactory.php
'title'   => dummy('text@words:5-9,title'),
'excerpt' => dummy('text@sentences:2'),
'body'    => dummy('text@paragraphs:3-5'),

Then move on to images once you've confirmed GD is loaded.

Implementation Patterns

Exact vs. ranged counts. Every text@ generator accepts a single number or a range, and this is the main reason to prefer it over Faker for layout work: you can guarantee a card never overflows.

dummy('text@words:30-60');      // range
dummy('text@sentences:3');     // exact
dummy('text@paragraphs:2-3');  // paragraph blocks for article bodies

Title casing for headings. The ,title modifier is positional — it comes after the range:

dummy('text@words:5-9,title');  // Headline-Style Output

Use it for <h1>/nav/card titles and leave it off body copy. Don't try to Str::title() the output yourself; the modifier exists so headings and body share one generator call.

Seeding and demos. Because the package caches text pools and directory scans per request, generating a whole seed batch in one command is cheap. This is the intended pattern: one seeder, hundreds of rows, no per-call filesystem thrash.

public function run(): void
{
    Post::factory()->count(200)->create();
}

Blade fixtures and UI states. Use the package in layouts you're prototyping before real content exists — long-word edge cases, short excerpts, multi-paragraph bodies. Pair it with the image generators (see the demo for the density/preview syntax) to stub avatars, hero images, and thumbnails in one pass.

Non-Laravel contexts. v2.0.0 also supports standalone Composer and folder-only installs, so the same syntax works in a static marketing prototype or a design handoff without booting Laravel. That's useful for keeping fixture copy identical between the app and a design repo.

Upgrade path. The dummy(), dumb_luck(), and dumb_question() signatures are unchanged from v1, so this is mostly a drop-in — the work is validating your PHP version and GD, not rewriting call sites.

Gotchas and Tips

• It's a --dev package. Guard your call sites. Nothing stops dummy() from rendering in production, and it will happily serve lorem ipsum to real users. Keep it in factories/seeders/tests, or gate demo routes behind app()->isLocal().
• PHP 8.3 is a hard floor now. This is the only genuinely breaking change for existing users. Bump composer.json ("php": "^8.3") and your CI matrix together, or Composer will resolve you back to v1 on 8.2 runners.
• Session and memory-limit side effects were removed. If anything in your app quietly depended on the package starting a session or raising memory_limit, set those explicitly in config/session.php / your bootstrap. This is a silent behavioural change, not an error.
• Determinism. Per-request caching speeds things up but means output is stable within a request and different across requests. Never assert on exact strings in tests — assert on word counts or assertNotEmpty().
• Image cache needs a writable path. Renders are cropped/resized in a single GD pass and written atomically, which is good (no half-written files), but the target directory still needs to be writable by the web user. Failures here usually surface as broken images rather than exceptions — check storage/ permissions first when images go missing.
• Debugging text output. If counts look wrong, confirm you used : not = and that the range is min-max with no spaces. Ranges are inclusive, so 2-3 yields two or three paragraphs, never one.
• Extension points are deliberately thin. There's no documented custom-text-pool or driver registration in this release; if you need domain-specific filler, wrap the package in your own helper rather than reaching into internals that may not exist.
• Verify before trusting. v2.0.0's claim of 58 tests across six PHP × Laravel combinations is a good sign, but it isn't your app's matrix. Smoke-test one factory and one image render on your actual runtime before rolling it across a large test suite.