README

Model factory builder for the Meritum ecosystem — defines Faker-backed attribute sets for meritum/database models and builds or persists them in tests and seeders. Each model gets its own factory Definition, registered via the model.factory.definitions kernel tag — the same pattern meritum/cli uses for commands — so any project can ship its own definitions and have them discovered automatically, with no central registry to maintain.

Requirements

PHP 8.4+
georgeff/kernel ^1.10
meritum/database ^1.3
fakerphp/faker ^1.23

Installation

composer require meritum/model-factory

Usage

Defining a factory

Extend Definition once per model. It's constructed with a Faker\Generator, and returns the model's default attribute set:

use Faker\Generator;
use Meritum\ModelFactory\Definition;

final class PostDefinition extends Definition
{
    public function getModelClass(): string
    {
        return Post::class;
    }

    public function getDefinition(): array
    {
        return [
            'title' => $this->faker->sentence,
            'body'  => $this->faker->paragraph,
        ];
    }
}

Registering the module

Add ModelFactoryModule to your kernel. It requires a DatabaseManagerInterface to already be registered — the module doesn't build one itself, the same way meritum/structured-logging expects a LoggerInterface to already exist:

use Meritum\ModelFactory\ModelFactoryModule;
use Georgeff\Database\Contract\DatabaseManagerInterface;

$kernel->define(DatabaseManagerInterface::class, fn() => /* ... */);
$kernel->addModule(new ModelFactoryModule());

Each Definition subclass is registered like any other tagged service — the module doesn't scan for them, it resolves whatever's tagged:

use Faker\Generator;
use Psr\Container\ContainerInterface;
use Meritum\ModelFactory\FactoryOption;

$kernel->define(PostDefinition::class, fn(ContainerInterface $c) => new PostDefinition($c->get(Generator::class)))
       ->tag(FactoryOption::DefinitionTag->value);

Building and persisting models

Resolve ModelFactoryInterface from the container and use make(), create(), or collection():

use Meritum\ModelFactory\ModelFactoryInterface;

$factory = $kernel->getContainer()->get(ModelFactoryInterface::class);

// Build without persisting — attributes come from the Definition
$post = $factory->make(Post::class);

// Build with specific attributes overriding the Definition's defaults
$post = $factory->make(Post::class, ['title' => 'A specific title']);

// Build and persist
$post = $factory->create(Post::class);

// Build (or persist) several at once
$posts = $factory->collection(10, Post::class);           // persisted, keyed by primary key
$posts = $factory->collection(10, Post::class, [], false); // not persisted, keyed by index

make()/create()/collection() are generic over the model class — $factory->make(Post::class) is inferred as returning Post, not just the base Model type, so callers get proper static typing without needing to annotate anything themselves.

meritum / model-factory

Maintainers

Package info

Statistics

Security