Seeding mock listings

Now that we have a database table for our listings, let's seed it with the mock data. To do so we're going to have to do the following:

1. Load the database/data.json file
2. Parse the file
3. Insert the data into the listings table

Creating a seeder

Laravel includes a seeder class that we can extend called Seeder. Use this Artisan command to implement it:

$ php artisan make:seeder ListingsTableSeeder

When we run the seeder, any code in the run method is executed.

database/ListingsTableSeeder.php:

<?php

use Illuminate\Database\Seeder;

class ListingsTableSeeder extends Seeder
{
  public function run()
  {
    //
  }
}

Loading the mock data

Laravel provides a File facade that allows us to open files from disk as simply as File::get($path). To get the full path to our mock data file we can use the base_path() helper function, which returns the path to the root of our application directory as a string.

It's then trivial to convert this JSON file to a PHP array using the built-in json_decode...