Environment:

• PHP 8.0
• MySQL 8.0
• Laravel 8.0

I recently had to pre-populate a database with a large amount of data. The data consisted of a list of around 800 brand names. To do this in a Seeder class was obviously going to make a very large seeder file, hard to maintain if that list changed during development. I wanted to use an external file to seed the data. This would allow me to export the names from an Excel file or just about any other way the list could be provided to me. Here’s how I did it. Maybe it will help you if you have a similar situation.

The list was provided as an Excel file with one long column of brand names.

First things first, I exported the data as a simple csv file, which resulted in a basic list of each item on it’s own line, without commas since there was only one column.

Next, I opened that file in Sublime Text (my go-to text editor these days) for cleanup. I found some garbage in the names, probably due to the way the list was generated. For example, one of the lines was this:

“Febreze Linen & Sky,"

The comma would be a problem and I didn’t want the quotes around the text. Using replace all, I could fix those up.

The last step in preparing the file was to make one long comma separated list. I replaced the new-lines with , (no space), and saved it in the /public/seed-data folder of the project. Note: This is the root level public folder, not the /storage/app/public folder although you could use that too.

Next, I opened the BrandSeeder file. If you don’t already have it, you could create it using

php artisan make:seeder BrandSeeder.

I’ll show the code expanded a little more than my final version to allow for comments explaining each line.

public function run()
{
    // Using public_path() points to the /public folder
    //   instead of the /storage/app/public folder.
    $path = public_path('seed-data/Brands_list.csv');
    
    // Use File::get() instead of Storage::get() to retrieve
    //   the contents of the file.
    $fileContents = File::get($path);
    
    // The contents are brand1,brand2,brand3,etc... so splitting it
    //   with commas works perfect.
    $items = explode(',', $fileContents);
    
    // Iterate over the array and insert the values into the table.
    foreach ($items as $item) {
        DB::table('brands')->insert(['brand_name' => $item]);
    }
}

Here’s the file after removing comments and combining actions for brevity:

<?php

namespace Database\Seeders;

use Illuminate\Database\Seeder;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\File;

class BrandSeeder extends Seeder
{
    public function run()
    {
        $items = explode(',', File::get(public_path('seed-data/Brands_list.csv')));
        foreach ($items as $item) {
            DB::table('brands')->insert(['brand_name' => $item]);
        }
    }
}

You can test your seed file using

php artisan db:seed --class=BrandSeeder

I use MySQL Workbench to view the table contents.

I hope this helps!