Laravel seed after migrating

Question

Is there something I can put in my migrations to automatically seed the table with test data once the migration has completed?

Or do you have to seed separately?

Answer 1

You can call migrate:refresh with the --seed option to automatically seed after the migrations are complete:

php artisan migrate:refresh --seed 

This will rollback and re-run all your migrations and run all seeders afterwards.

---

Just as a little extra, you can also always use Artisan::call() to run an artisan command from inside the application:

Artisan::call('db:seed'); 

or

Artisan::call('db:seed', array('--class' => 'YourSeederClass')); 

if you want specific seeder class.

Answer 2

If you don't want to delete existing data and want to seed after migrating

lukasgeiter's answer is correct for test data, but running following artisan command

php artisan migrate:refresh --seed 

in production will refresh your database removing any data entered or updated from frontend.

If you want to seed your database along a migration (example rolling out an update to your application keeping existing data), like adding a new table countries along with seed data, you can do the following:

Create a database seeder example YourSeeder.php in database/seeds and your location table migration

class YourTable extends Migration {     /**      * Run the migrations.      *      * @return void      */     public function up()     {         Schema::create('tablename', function (Blueprint $table) {             $table->increments('id');             $table->string('name',1000);             $table->timestamps();             $table->softDeletes();         });          $seeder = new YourTableSeeder();         $seeder->run();     }      /**     * Reverse the migrations.     *     * @return void     */     public function down()     {         Schema::dropIfExists('tablename');     } } 

Run composer dump-autoload if there is a php class not found error for YourTableSeeder class.