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DummyGenerator#

Software License

Installation#

composer require johnykvsky/dummygenerator --dev

About#

DummyGenerator is dummy/fake data generator for PHP. It's a fork of Faker, heavily rewritten at core, but overall is same easy to use. In example:

$generator = DummyGeneratorFactory::create(); // all extensions are loaded
echo $generator->firstName();

But why...?#

Faker died because of being hard to maintain as mentioned in sunsetting-faker. Faker 2.0 seems to be dead because of "death by committee" kind of stuff.

I needed simple dummy data generator for PHP 8.3, with modern architecture in mind. This is how DummyGenerator came to life.

Changes (vs Faker)#

  • required PHP >= 8.3
  • PHPStan level 8 friendly
  • PHPUnit tests for core and extensions (yep, some just check for not empty, but hey, it's random data)
  • all mt_rand / array_rand replaced with \Random\Randomizer
  • no static methods, only one magic method (__call() in generator)
  • interfaces and dependency injection for everything (all core implementations can be replaced with different ones)
  • implementations can be changed on the fly with addDefinition()
  • language providers removed from core, that makes generator ~9.5Mb smaller
  • changed DateTime extension, it supports DateTimeInterface for methods params (not only strings)
  • changed Uuid, it supports v4 only, use uuid4()
  • removed database providers (core is only for dummy data generation)
  • removed HmlLorem
  • removed File::filePath() since it was interacting with system, not only generating dummy data
  • added Enum, to get random values from PHP enums
  • added String, to generate random string from given pool
  • added support for SystemClock, PSR-20 implementation of Clock
  • added AnyDateTime, as alternative/replacement for DateTime extension (see docs for more)

This package also fixes problem with FakerPHP __destruct() messing up with seed(), plus various other issues.

There are two Randomizer implementations available: * default Randomizer * additional XoshiroRandomizer, which supports seed() - to be used in tests

Why PHP >= 8.3#

Because of introduced in PHP 8.3:

  • Randomizer::getFloat()
  • Randomizer::getBytesFromString()
  • and not so important but nice: typed class constants

Other stuff#

There is script\ExtensionsDocs.php that can be used to generate list of available extensions and their methods (look at generate-spec.php)

Since PHPUnit is still missing --repeat, in repository phpunit-repeat you can find Linux shell script for running tests multiple times.