Migrating from vierge-noire/cakephp-fixture-factories

This package is a maintained fork of vierge-noire/cakephp-fixture-factories. If you're upgrading from vierge-noire/cakephp-fixture-factories:^3.0, the breaking changes are:

1. Default-data API: setDefaultTemplate() + $this->setDefaultData(...) is replaced by a single definition(GeneratorInterface $generator): array method.
2. Generator type: callbacks receive GeneratorInterface instead of Faker\Generator.

If you don't migrate the default-data API, your factories will silently produce empty data on v2 — setDefaultTemplate() is no longer wired up.

Default-data API

Replace setDefaultTemplate() + setDefaultData() with definition():

- use Faker\Generator;
+ use CakephpFixtureFactories\Generator\GeneratorInterface;

- protected function setDefaultTemplate(): void
- {
-     $this->setDefaultData(function (Generator $faker) {
-         return [
-             'email' => $faker->email,
-         ];
-     });
- }
+ public function definition(GeneratorInterface $generator): array
+ {
+     return [
+         'email' => $generator->email(),
+     ];
+ }

The bundled Rector ruleset performs this rewrite automatically:

vendor/bin/rector process tests --config vendor/dereuromark/cakephp-fixture-factories/rector.php

See the v1 → v2 upgrade guide for the full ruleset and the call-site renames it covers.

Key changes

• Migrate setDefaultTemplate() wrappers to definition(GeneratorInterface $generator): array.
• Replace Faker\Generator type hints with GeneratorInterface.
• Inside definition(), use the $generator parameter; $this->getGenerator() works too but the parameter is preferred.
• Prefer method calls ->email() over property access ->email (both still work for Faker, but only methods work for DummyGenerator).

Why?

The fork introduces a generator abstraction so you can pick between Faker and DummyGenerator — or plug in a custom adapter. Faker remains the default, so existing factories keep working once the API rename and type-hint updates are in.

See Generators for a full comparison and the per-method compatibility matrix.

Other differences

• Modern, configurable type guessing per field name/type when baking — see Bake command.
• Drops support for older CakePHP versions; check composer.json for the supported range.
• PHPStan level 8 across the codebase — better IDE / static-analysis support for your factories.