Laravel - Seeding Many-to-Many Relationship

Question

I have a users table and a roles table that has a many-to-many relationship. These two tables are connected to a junction table called role_user.

This is a model of the tables and its connections.

Below are the Models in my Laravel project:

User

namespace App;  use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;  class User extends Model {     public function roles()     {         return $this->belongsToMany('App\Role');     } } 

Role

namespace App;  use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Model;  class Role extends Model {     public function users()     {         return $this->belongsToMany('App\User');     } } 

Below is the Factory file in the Laravel project:

$factory->define(App\User::class, function (Faker\Generator $faker) {     return [         'name' => $faker->name,         'email' => $faker->unique()->safeEmail,         'password' => $password ?: $password = bcrypt('secret'),     ]; });  $factory->define(App\Role::class, function (Faker\Generator $faker) {     return [         'role' => $faker->realText($maxNbChars = 2),         'description' => $faker->realText($maxNbChars = 20),     ]; }); 

Below is the Seed file in the Laravel project:

public function run() {     factory(App\User::class, 50)->create()->each(function ($u) {         $u->roles()->save(factory(App\Role::class)->make());     });      factory(App\Role::class, 20)->create()->each(function ($u) {         $u->users()->save(factory(App\User::class)->make());     }); } 

This should populate the users table and the roles table but how do I go about populating the role_user table? (I don't have a Model file for the junction table.)

I'm very new at this so any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

You can use attach() or sync() method on a many-to-many relationship.

There are multiple ways you can approach this. Here one of them:

// Populate roles factory(App\Role::class, 20)->create();  // Populate users factory(App\User::class, 50)->create();  // Get all the roles attaching up to 3 random roles to each user $roles = App\Role::all();  // Populate the pivot table App\User::all()->each(function ($user) use ($roles) {      $user->roles()->attach(         $roles->random(rand(1, 3))->pluck('id')->toArray()     );  });