Sanitize/fake database from a single artisan command

Laravel factories and database seeding is really great tool to populate dummy data. However, sometimes all you want is a real production-like data to work with. Because that mostly contains all workflows and different data sets created by different domain events.

You can get around that by exporting a production database and use that for development.. However, it is not a great idea to have real production information in your local development environment as it may contain customer's personal details, patient information etc. This package helps you to sanitize your production-like database with dummy values, so you don't have to worry about keeping important production information on your development/testing environments.

Installation :

composer require techsemicolon/laravel-database-sanitizer

Usage :

You need to publish the vendor assets to get the sanitizer.php config file.

php artisan vendor:publish --provider=\Techsemicolon\Sanitizer\DatabaseSanitizerServiceProvider

This will have a new config file config/sanitizer.php. You can specify which models would need sanitization & models which need a complete truncate :

return [

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Models to Sanitize
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | Add all models which you would like to sanitize
    |
    */

    'sanitize_models' => [
        User::class
    ],

    /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Models to Truncate
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | Add all models which you would like to truncate
    |
    */

    'truncate_models' => [
        CustomLog::class
    ],

]

Each model specified in above configuration's sanitize_models array needs to have a method called sanitize, which will return array of columns to sanitize with dummy values like below :

/**
 * Sanitizer function for model
 */
public function sanitize()
{
    return [
        'first_name' => function($model, $faker){
            return $faker->firstName;
        },
        'middle_name' => function($model, $faker){
            return $faker->firstName;
        },
        'last_name' => function($model, $faker){
            return $faker->lastName;
        },
        'phone' => '+1-123-123-1231'
    ];
}

And then finaly run the command :

php artisan db:sanitize

This will put dummy values in first_name, middle_name, last_name and phone columns for User Model. However, the fun part is that, dummy values for first_name, middle_name and last_name will be different and generated by Faker library as used in laravel factories.. The phone contains a static string value.

Also, the custom_logs table will be truncated as the model CustomLog is specified in configuration for truncate_models.

Flexibility :

You can also have conditional dummy value based on specific model like below :

/**
 * Sanitizer function for model
 */
public function sanitize()
{
    return [
        'is_local' => function($model, $faker){
            return $model->country == 'USA';
        }
    ];
}

If you would like to know which tables will be sanitized before actually running the command, you can pass --info option :

php artisan db:sanitize --info

If you would like to sanitize some specific tables only, you can pass --tables= with comma separated mysql table names :

php artisan db:sanitize --tables=users,customers

If you would like to just run truncate operation and skip the models to sanitize, you can pass --truncate option :

php artisan db:sanitize --truncate

License :

This psckage is open-sourced software licensed under the MIT license