Inverse seed generator (iSeed) is a Laravel 4 package that provides a method to generate a new seed file based on data from the existing database table.

Installation

1. Edit your project's composer.json file to require orangehill/iseed.

   "require": { "laravel/framework": "4.0.*", "orangehill/iseed": "dev-master" }

2. Update Composer from the CLI:

   composer update

3. Once this operation completes, add the service provider by opening a app/config/app.php file, and adding a new item to the providers array.

   'Orangehill\Iseed\IseedServiceProvider'

Usage

To generate a seed file for your users table simply call: \Iseed::generateSeed('users');

This will create a file inside a /app/database/seeds, with the contents similar to following example:

<?php

// File: /app/database/seeds/UsersTableSeeder.php

class UsersTableSeeder extends Seeder {

	/**
	 * Auto generated seed file
	 *
	 * @return void
	 */
	public function run()
	{
		\DB::table('users')->delete();
		\DB::table('users')->insert(array (
			0 =>
			array (
				'id' => '1',
				'email' => '[email protected]',
				'password' => '$2y$10$tUGCkQf/0NY3w1l9sobGsudt6UngnoVXx/lUoh9ElcSOD0ERRkK9C',
				'permissions' => NULL,
				'activated' => '1',
				'activation_code' => NULL,
				'activated_at' => NULL,
				'last_login' => NULL,
				'persist_code' => NULL,
				'reset_password_code' => NULL,
				'first_name' => NULL,
				'last_name' => NULL,
				'created_at' => '2013-06-11 07:47:40',
				'updated_at' => '2013-06-11 07:47:40',
			),
			1 =>
			array (
				'id' => '2',
				'email' => '[email protected]',
				'password' => '$2y$10$ImNvsMzK/BOgNSYgpjs/3OjMKMHeA9BH/hjl43EiuBuLkZGPMuZ2W',
				'permissions' => NULL,
				'activated' => '1',
				'activation_code' => NULL,
				'activated_at' => NULL,
				'last_login' => '2013-06-11 07:54:57',
				'persist_code' => '$2y$10$C0la8WuyqC6AU2TpUwj0I.E3Mrva8A3tuVFWxXN5u7jswRKzsYYHK',
				'reset_password_code' => NULL,
				'first_name' => NULL,
				'last_name' => NULL,
				'created_at' => '2013-06-11 07:47:40',
				'updated_at' => '2013-06-11 07:54:57',
			),
		));
	}

}

This command will also update app/database/seeds/DatabaseSeeder.php to include a call to this newly generated seed class.

Alternatively you can run Iseed from the command line using Artisan, e.g. php artisan iseed users.

To (re)seed the database go to the Terminal and run Laravel's db:seed command (php artisan db:seed).

Please note that some users encountered a problem with large DB table exports (error when seeding from table with many records). The issue was solved by splitting input data into smaller chunks of elements per insert statement. As you may need to change the chunk size value in some extreme cases where DB table has a large number of columns, the chunk size is configurable in iSeed's config.php file:

'chunk_size' => 500 // Maximum number of rows per insert statement