How to create a factory with images for testing

Question

I need to create a factory that create images for testing. The factory should create images and save them on storage and after the test everything should be erased.

How can I do that ?

What I am thinking now is to put the fields at null on the factory and then using the afterCreating method to save the images manually but it has to be a better way to do that right ?

What I want to achieve is :

factory(Category::class)->create();

That will generate all images.

$faker->image does not work anymore since LoremPixel (the provider) is really slow or down most of the time.

Answer 1

The cleaner way I found is:

1. Set the value at null on the factory

   $factory->define(Category::class, function (Faker $faker) {
       return [
           'img' => null,
      ];});
   

2. Use $factory->afterCreating to override the value and save the image

   $factory->afterCreating(Category::class, function ($category, $faker) {
      $category->img = UploadedFile::fake()->image(uniqid() . '.jpg')->store('categories');
      $category->save();
   });
   

3. Create a fake storage on test setUp() and reset it on tearDown()

   protected function setUp(): void {parent::setUp();Storage::fake('public');}

   protected function tearDown(): void{ Storage::fake('public'); }

This solution creates images for testing and remove everything after it.

(Sorry for code sample, I can't make it indent properly)