How to use Laravel 7.x model factories in Laravel 8
Laravel 8’s class-based model factories are great and I’ve written an entire article about what they are and how they are more feature-rich and useful than the traditional factories that we used to write prior to Laravel 8.
So, if you’re spinning up a new application from Laravel 8, you’ll be obviously using class-based factories but if you’re upgrading to Laravel 8, from let’s say Laravel 7.x, you might be considering using the old factories for a number of reasons. One of being your application already has a lot of factories written and you don’t want to refactor them to the class-based ones all at once.
The laravel/legacy-factories package
In scenarios like this, you can install the laravel/legacy-factories composer package into your application which will allow you to use the legacy/traditional factories in your Laravel application without changing anything in your application.
You can install this package using Composer like so.
$ composer require laravel/legacy-factories
This is a first-party package developed by the Laravel team itself. So, no issues of authenticity over there.
In closing
Although you can continue using the legacy factories using this package, I would highly recommend using the newest class-based factories as those provide more features and are easy to manage as well. So, you should consider refactoring your existing ones slowly over time, in my opinion.
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