Laravel Modern Factories

This package brings modern Laravel Factories (circa Laravel 8) to older versions of Laravel, with the aim of helping legacy applications update to modern Laravel.

Usage of Laravel 7 and older is waning, but it ain't zero. Trying to upgrade? Maybe this package can help.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Installation
• Versioning
• Usage

Introduction

If you're still using Laravel 7 or older, you already know that it's high time to upgrade, but let's be real, there's probably some roadblocks in the way. One of the roadblocks I've been faced having confidence that I don't break anything when upgrading. There are a few tools to combat this:

• Laravel Shift
• Larastan (requires Laravel 6.x or greater) or PHPStan (requires PHP 7.1 or greater)
• PHPUnit (requires PHP 5.3 or greater)

This package is meant to aid your investment in automated testing via PHPUnit. When you're behind on your version of Laravel, you've got technical debt. Usually, upgrading your version of Laravel is a common blocker for multiple avenues of addressing your technical debt. That said, if you're paying down your technical debt by writing automated tests using legacy Laravel Factories, there's effectively a tax associated with every payment, as once you get to Laravel 8, you'll be pressured to upgrade to modern Laravel Factories. You can use laravel/legacy-factories to keep moving forward with your legacy factories, but let's be real, that's not what you want either.

Installation

Install this package using composer:

composer require reedware/laravel-modern-factories

This package doesn't use any facades or service providers.

Versioning

This package targets the feature set of Laravel 8.x Eloquent Factories. If you're on Laravel 8 or greater, don't use this package; just use the native Eloquent Factories.

The following Laravel and PHP versions are supported:

Usage

Refer to the Laravel 8.x Documentation on Eloquent Factories. This package autoloads into the Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories namespace (which isn't used prior to Laravel 8), so the documentation can be followed verbatim.

Changes for 5.6 or Older

The new and for keywords are not allowed as method names. You can use newFactory and forModel instead. Newer versions of PHP (7.0 or greater) can use the new and for methods as-is.