Run Laravel 5 seeder programmatically instead of from CLI

Question

Is there a way to run the Laravel 5 seeder from within PHP rather than from the command line. The hosting I am using doesn't allow me to use the command line. Just to confirm I want to do the equivalent of this but in my app code:

php artisan db:seed

Solution 1

You can use the following method:

Artisan::call('db:seed');

To get the output of the last run command, you can use:

Artisan::output();

Solution 2

You can also call directly the Seeder class if needed. Just make sure you did a composer dump-autoload if you created your seeder manually.

From there code is very straightforward :

$seeder = new YourSeederClass();
$seeder->run();

Solution 3

You can add parameters to the seeder on run

example

  $newSchool = School::create($data);

     $schoolMeals = new \MealSeeder();
     $schoolMeals->run($newSchool->id);

//school meal

 public function run($school = 1)
    {

        $time = Carbon::now();

        App\Meal::create([
            'school_id' => $school,
            'name' => 'Breakfast',
            'slug' => 'breakfast',
            'description' => 'Test Meal',
            'start_time' => $time->toTimeString(),
            'end_time' => $time->addMinutes(60)->toTimeString(),
        ]);
        App\Meal::create([
            'school_id' => $school,
            'name' => 'Lunch',
            'slug' => 'lunch',
            'description' => 'Test Meal',
            'start_time' => $time->toTimeString(),
            'end_time' => $time->addMinutes(60)->toTimeString(),
        ]);
        App\Meal::create([
            'school_id' => $school,
            'name' => 'Supper',
            'slug' => 'supper',
            'description' => 'Test Meal',
            'start_time' => $time->toTimeString(),
            'end_time' => $time->addMinutes(60)->toTimeString(),
        ]);
    }

Comments

[Kirkland]

Related: How do you call this for a specific class? For example, if you want to call the equivalent of php artisan db:seed --class=User? I see that you pass an array to the Artisan::call() function, but I get an invalid argument exception when I use Artisan::call('db:seed', ['class'=>'Users']) saying "The 'class' argument does not exist."

[Cameron]

Artisan::call('command:name', array('argument' => 'foo', '--option' => 'bar')); See laravel.com/docs/4.2/commands#calling-other-commands

[Thomas]

The answer below is a much better option

[alvaropgl]

Caution if using Seeder::command() or Seeder:container(). Its its not initilized on constructor call. I have used instead from my seeder to call another seeder the method Seeder::resolve($className) as it setups $container and $command instances

[Sven]

@Kirkland, If you want to run specific seeder Class, try Artisan::call('db:seed', ['--class' => 'YourSeederClass']);

[PhillipMcCubbin]

To do it in 1 line: (new MySeeder)->run();