Fake Data

clarkwinkelmann

Fake Data by MigrateToFlarum

This extension allows you to generate fake data to test your forum.

You choose the 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.
Alternatively, a list of user-provided user IDs can be used (REST API and command line only).

If you do not create new discussions, random existing discussions will be picked for new posts.
Alternatively, a list of user-provided discussion IDs can be used (REST API and command line only).

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

The date seed is made of two options: start date will be parsed by Carbon::parse(), so it accepts dates in many formats (example 2021-01-01 15:00:00) as well as human time (example 2 days ago).
Date interval is in seconds.
Every time the seed needs a date, the interval will be used to make it unique (user join date, discussion creation time, reply time, ...)
If you generate many records at once with the default date settings, part of the content will end up a few minutes or hours in the future.

The extension can be used via 3 different methods:

Via the Flarum frontend, in the admin panel (global seed) or in the discussion action dropdown (discussion seed).
Via the command line. Run php flarum help migratetoflarum:fake-data to view the list of options.
Via the REST API. Perform a POST request to /api/fake-data. The body can be JSON or any format recognized by Flarum. The parameters have the same name as the command line, for example user_count.

Even though the feature is restricted to admin accounts, It's probably best to not install this on a production forum!

There is no way to mass delete the generated data.

Installation

composer require migratetoflarum/fake-data

Links

clarkwinkelmann

jdoe no.

clarkwinkelmann There is no way to mass delete the generated data.

If you only created discussions, you could use Mass Actions to disable multiple discussions at once.

If you need to do tests on production data, you should create a backup first, do the tests on a copy and discard the copy once finished.

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.

clarkwinkelmann

Version 0.3.2 has been released with some fixes:

Usernames are now Flarum compliant (no more dots, and they will now have either dashes or underscores)
Add uniqueness checks for username and emails against existing database records

You will also find a beta14-compatible version on the beta14 branch (not tagged yet)

Ralkage

clarkwinkelmann would love some Reactions on Discuss right about now 🤣

But in the meantime....WOOHOOOO!!! 🥳 I am always finding myself needed to generate fake data for my local Flarum test installs to do extension development and debugging. Also works when I need to get Cypress stuff going on a new machine 👀

clarkwinkelmann

Seems like I forgot to post about beta 14 support here. Version 0.3.3 adds support.

This is the first extension I made compatible on the day of the release.

Pika

clarkwinkelmann How can I delete all things that Created by fakedata? thank you!

luceos

This extension, fake data, is active on all beta sites.

luceos

Pika reinstall. This extension isn't meant to be used on a production forum.