Fake Data

clarkwinkelmann

Fake Data by MigrateToFlarum

This extension allows you to generate fake data for testing your forum.

You choose number of new users, discussions and posts.

If you do not create new users, random existing users will be picked as authors for new discussions and posts.

If you do not create new discussions, random existing discussions will be picked for new posts.

A new button is added on discussions if you want to generate replies to that discussion only.

The script can be called via the API at /api/fake-data with parameters user_count, discussion_count and posts_count. If you pass zero for users or discussions, you can provide user_ids and/or discussion_ids to restrict which users/discussions can be picked.

It's probably best to not install this on your production forum!

Watch me code it live on the Clark writes code channel

Installation

Use Bazaar or install manually:

composer require migratetoflarum/fake-data

Updating

composer update migratetoflarum/fake-data
php flarum cache:clear

A MigrateToFlarum extension

This is a free extension by MigrateToFlarum, an online forum migration tool (launching soon).
Follow us on Twitter for updates https://twitter.com/MigrateToFlarum

Need a custom Flarum extension ? Contact Clark Winkelmann !

Links

collins

cool

Ralkage

Looks like it starts to throw errors as soon as an email address from the Faker package is used again due to email addresses needing to be unique according to Flarum yelling at me 🙁

Illuminate\Database\QueryException: SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1062 Duplicate entry 'ykonopelski@example.net' for key 'users_email_unique' (SQL: insert intousers(email,username,is_email_confirmed,joined_at) values (ykonopelski@example.net, ltillman, 1, 2019-08-28 15:36:23)) in C:\wamp64\www\b81.local\vendor\illuminate\database\Connection.php:664

I LOVE this extension btw 😃 easy to use for extension development purposes hands down 🙌

clarkwinkelmann

Ralkage ahah yes that's something I talk about in the video (I just wrote this extension today while live streaming). I'll address it in a future update. That's always a problem with Faker data, it's hard to make it unique across multiple runs.

I could also generate emails that look less like real emails but guarantee their uniqueness.

luceos

clarkwinkelmann might want to use a time based uuid somewhere..

Cathas9lives

When I click the Generate data button, The requested resource was not found. I use beta 10

clarkwinkelmann

Cathas9lives sorry I must have missed your message.

What input did you give the extension ? Can you maybe enable debug mode and try again to see if it's a route not found error or something else ?

It's quite possible that if you try generating only posts while you don't have any discussion on the forum it will fail. Other combinations (users only or discussions only) shouldn't error for a resource not found.

clarkwinkelmann

Released version 0.2.0 with new API parameters and a new modal in the frontend to generate replies to a specific discussion.

Cathas9lives

Could I use the real data from a database?

clarkwinkelmann

Cathas9lives how would that work ? The whole purpose of this extension is to create random data.

You're probably looking for some import script ?

Ralkage

Me: I don't wanna manually create like 50 users, threads, and posts 🥺

Also me: OH! That's right, @clarkwinkelmann build this amazing extension saving me countless hours of generating fake data 😼

Besides the little issue with not being able to generate a bazillion unique users due to the reuse of usernames and for the fact that Flarum does not like dupes, you are a life and time saver Clark!

clarkwinkelmann

Ralkage yeah I'm very aware of that. I has just not bothered me enough to force me implementing it yet 😂

I'm thinking of two options:

Drop realistic email addresses and just use something time-based as suggested by luceos above, that way you can create as many as you want without any problem
Allow setting a prefix for new emails

With probably an option to keep using the default Faker generator.

clarkwinkelmann

Released version 0.3.0. This version only works on beta 12 and upwards.

Fix issue with discussion meta not always being updated, causing the discussions to be invisible to non-admins
Improve performance when refreshing discussion metadata
Introduce bulk mode

In bulk mode, a single author/title/content will be picked and reused for all new discussions and posts. New users will have the same username and email, with an incremental number at the end. In my tests this reduced the run time by two when creating 10k discussions.

askvortsov

As a side note, users are sometimes created with periods in usernames, which doesn't satisfy username validation. I think this breaks mentionig those users, although I'm not sure whether or not this is important enough to fix.

clarkwinkelmann

askvortsov correct. It's never been an issue for me because I rarely need to mention those fake users, but I can try to fix that in a future release.

The reason dots are included is because I use the "username" output of the Faker library, which returns some values that might not fit Flarum validation.

There are so many possible additions.