How to Generate the Same Data on Every Run of Your Laravel Seeders

It can get annoying very quickly when you are working on a project and you need the same dataset whenever you refresh your database with your seeders but you keep getting a fresh set of data.

You execute:

php artisan migrate:fresh --seed

And boom — all your data is regenerated with a completely new set. I encountered this frustration so many times until it came to me: "Wait, there is a better way to do this."

I remembered Faker (the library used to generate random data in Laravel) has a way to provide a seed to enable developers to generate the same set of data every time. If you are not familiar with what a seed is in Faker, a quick search returns this:

A seed is essentially an initialising value for a random number generator. For the Faker library this allows you to use a string, number or some value that will be a starting point for all random values generated in sequence. This means, using the same seed produces the same result each time.

So I decided to add this one line that specifies the seed:

$faker->seed(100);

The number 100 passed to seed() is just an arbitrary number. You can pass in any number — provided it stays the same, Faker will always regenerate the same data.

Putting it all together

This is what my database/seeders/DatabaseSeeder.php file looks like:

<?php

namespace Database\Seeders;

use Artisan;
use Faker\Generator;
use Illuminate\Database\Seeder;

class DatabaseSeeder extends Seeder
{
    public function run(Generator $faker)
    {
        $faker->seed(100);

        $this->call(UsersTableSeeder::class);
        // ...
    }
}

Hope this helps someone. ☺️