Laravel 8, Model factory class not found

Question

so when using the new model factories class introduced in laravel 8.x, ive this weird issue saying that laravel cannot find the factory that corresponds to the model. i get this error

PHP Error:  Class 'Database/Factories/BusinessUserFactory' not found in .....

tho ive followed the laravel docs, ive no idea whats going on

Here is the BusinessUser class

<?php

namespace App;

use Database\Factories\BusinessUserFactory;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\HasFactory;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;

class BusinessUser extends Model
{
    use HasFactory;
}

and the factory

<?php

namespace Database\Factories;

use App\BusinessUser;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\Factory;
use Illuminate\Support\Str;

class BusinessUserFactory extends Factory
{
    /**
     * The name of the factory's corresponding model.
     *
     * @var string
     */
    protected $model = BusinessUser::class;

    /**
     * Define the model's default state.
     *
     * @return array
     */
    public function definition()
    {
        return [
            'name' => "dsfsf"
        ];
    }
}

any ideas or leads is greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

If you upgraded to 8 from a previous version you are probably missing the autoload directive for the Database\Factories namespace in composer.json:

"autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
        "App\\": "app/",
        "Database\\Factories\\": "database/factories/",
        "Database\\Seeders\\": "database/seeders/"
    }
},

You can also remove the classmap part, since it is no longer needed.

Run composer dump after making these changes.

Laravel 8.x Docs - Upgrade Guide - Database - Seeder and Factory Namespace

Answer 2

Apparently you have to respect the folder structure as well. For example, if you have the User Model in the following path: app\Models\Users\User, then the respective factory should be located in database\factories\Users\UserFactory.