Persistent Seeders

Persistent Seeders allow you to easily maintain your seeded data in a central location, and ensures that your data only gets inserted once.

A prime use case for this is for Roles. At the start of an application, you probably have a few roles that you want to support

class RoleSeeder extends PersistentSeeder {
    #[SeederId('6f7b4e00-97d9-4cb0-8a6b-c092e73755e3')]
    function initialRoles() {
        Role::create(['name' => 'Admin']);
        Role::create(['name' => 'User']);
    }
}

As development continues, you realize that you need more roles. The usual process for this would be to update your regular seeder, and also manually write a migration to insert the new role, and then run it in production. However, with Persistent Seeders this entire process can be automated. All you need to do is add a new function in the same file! It now looks like this:

class RoleSeeder extends PersistentSeeder {
    #[SeederId('6f7b4e00-97d9-4cb0-8a6b-c092e73755e3')]
    function initialRoles() {
        Role::create(['name' => 'Admin']);
        Role::create(['name' => 'User']);
    }
    
    #[SeederId('ef97efe9-40bd-4948-a1cd-feeb8fb1b27f')]
    function managerRole() {
        Role::create(['name' => 'Manager']);
    }
}

When the seeder runs again, only the new Manager role will be created. No messing with migrations, no searching for other roles that exist. Just a straightforward understanding of your applications' data.

Installation

You can install the package via composer:

composer require riley19280/persistent-seeders

And then publish the migrations

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=persistent-seeder-migrations

Usage

Create a new database seeder and extend from PersistentSeeders\PersistentSeeder.

Then create your seed function, and add the SeederId attribute to the method. This attribute marks the method as a seeder, and relies on the uuid passed to it to prevent duplicate runs. If this id changes, the function will be run again.

php artisan make:seeder

class RoleSeeder extends PersistentSeeder {
    #[SeederId('6f7b4e00-97d9-4cb0-8a6b-c092e73755e3')]
    function initialRoles() {
        Role::create(['name' => 'Admin']);
    }
}

Extra Configuration

By default, the record of seed function run is stored in the seeders table. If you would like to change that location, you can publish the config file and change the table_name property.

php artisan vendor:publish --tag=persistent-seeder-config

return [
    'table_name' => 'my_custom_table_name',
];

Production Usage

This package is perfectly suited for production usage, even though you may be hesitant to run "seeders" in production.

The most straightforward approach is to create a ProductionSeeder class as a regular seeder, and then run it as part of your deploy process.

class ProductionSeeder extends Seeder
{
    public function run(): void
    {
        // Each of these is a PersistentSeeder
        $this->call(TenantSeeder::class);
        $this->call(RoleSeeder::class);
        $this->call(UserSeeder::class);
    }
}

php artisan db:seed --class=ProductionSeeder --force

Alternatively, you can run each individually

php artisan db:seed --class=TenantSeeder --force
php artisan db:seed --class=RoleSeeder --force
php artisan db:seed --class=UserSeeder --force