One of the things I really like about modern Laravel projects, are the new model factories introduced in Laravel 8.

When writing complex tests, you often need quite a lot of setup, and features like factories, and especially factory sequences make that setup significantly easier to do. Take a look at this example:

$blogPosts = BlogPost::factory()
    ->count(3)
    ->published()
    ->sequence(
        ['title' => 'Parallel php'],
        ['title' => 'Fibers'],
        ['title' => 'Thoughts on event sourcing'],
    )
    ->create();

This factory call will make three blog posts. Each post will have a published state, but also a different title, thanks to that sequence method.

Did you know that you even can use array destructuring to immediately get all three blogposts in separate variables?

[$a, $b, $c] = BlogPost::factory()
    ->count(3)
    ->published()
    ->sequence(
        ['title' => 'Parallel php'],
        ['title' => 'Fibers'],
        ['title' => 'Thoughts on event sourcing'],
    )
    ->create();

Pretty neat! These model factories are a great addition to Laravel. Oh and, if you were wondering, the Laravel Idea plugin has full autocomplete support for them in PhpStorm as well!