appeltaert / alice

Expressive fixtures generator

Alice - Expressive fixtures generator

Relying on fzaninotto/Faker, Alice allows you to create a ton of fixtures/fake data for use while developing or testing your project. It gives you a few essential tools to make it very easy to generate complex data with constraints in a readable and easy to edit way, so that everyone on your team can tweak the fixtures if needed.

Warning: this doc is being updated for alice 3.0. If you want to check the documentation for 2.x, head this way.

Table of Contents

1. Installation
2. Example
3. Getting Started
4. Basic Usage
5. Framework integration 1. Symfony
6. Complete Reference
7. Creating Fixtures 1. YAML 1. PHP
8. Fixture Ranges
9. Calling Methods
10. Specifying Constructor Arguments
11. Optional Data
12. Handling Unique Constraints
13. Handling Relations
14. References
15. Multiple References
16. Self reference
17. Passing references to providers
18. Keep Your Fixtures Dry
19. Fixture Inheritance
20. Including files
21. Variables
22. Parameters
23. Customize Data Generation
24. Faker Data
25. Localized Fake Data TODO: port that change to v2
26. Default Providers 1. Identity
27. Reuse generated data using objects value
28. Custom Faker Data Providers
29. Third-party libraries
30. Contribute
31. Upgrade
32. License

Other references:

• Tutorial: Using Alice in Symfony

Installation

This is installable via Composer as nelmio/alice:

composer require --dev nelmio/alice

Example

Here is a complete example of entity declaration:

Nelmio\Entity\User:
    user{1..10}:
        username: '<username()>'
        fullname: '<firstName()> <lastName()>'
        birthDate: '<date()>'
        email: '<email()>'
        favoriteNumber: '50%? <numberBetween(1, 200)>'

Nelmio\Entity\Group:
    group1:
        name: Admins
        owner: '@user1'
        members: '<numberBetween(1, 10)>x @user*'
        created: '<dateTimeBetween("-200 days", "now")>'
        updated: '<dateTimeBetween($created, "now")>'

You can then load them easily with:

$loader = new Nelmio\Alice\Loader\NativeLoader();
$objectSet = $loader->loadFile(__DIR__.'/fixtures.yml');

Or load an array right away:

$loader = new Nelmio\Alice\Loader\NativeLoader();
$objectSet = $loader->loadData([
    \Nelmio\Entity\User::class => [
        'user{1..10}' => [
            'username' => '<username()>',
            'fullname' => '<firstName()> <lastName()>',
            'birthDate' => '<date()>',
            'email' => '<email()>',
            'favoriteNumber' => '50%? <numberBetween(1, 200)>',
        ],
    ],
    \Nelmio\Entity\Group::class => [
        'group1' => [
            'name' => Admins,
            'owner' => '@user1',
            'members' => '<numberBetween(1, 10)>x @user*',
            'created' => '<dateTimeBetween("-200 days", "now")>',
            'updated' => '<dateTimeBetween($created, "now")>',
        ],
    ],
]);

For more information, refer to the documentation.

Third-party libraries

• Symfony:
  • hautelook/AliceBundle
  • h4cc/AliceFixturesBundle
  • knplabs/rad-fixtures-load
• Nette
  • Zenify/DoctrineFixtures
• Zend Framework 2:
  • ma-si/aist-alice-fixtures
• Framework Agnostic
  • trappar/AliceGenerator

Contribute

Check the contribution guide.

Upgrade

Check the upgrade guide.

License

Released under the MIT License.