Laravel Factories with Intermediate Tables - laravel

Question

I am trying to create a factory for a BlogPost model.
A blog post belongsToMany Tag and vice versa.
There is an intermediate table (blog_post_tag) to store the relations of blogposts to tags.
I would like to seed a blog post with a number of tag names.
How can one seed a DB using factories and intermediate tables?
May have an answer here
So I can add the following below to my BlogPost seeder. This would also create tags, but I would like to get existing tags (preferably 3-5 and only if any exist).
hasAttached() accepts a factory as the first argument so this will not work.
BlogPost::factory()
->hasAttached(
Tag::factory()->count(3)
)
->create();

Answer 1

This is how I fill my relations with existing data:
<?php
namespace Database\Factories;
use App\Models\Alpha;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\Factory;
use Illuminate\Support\Str;
use App\Models\Beta;
use App\Models\Gamma;
class AlphaFactory extends Factory {
protected $model = Alpha::class;
public function definition() {
$beta_ids = Beta::all()->pluck('id');
$gamma_ids = Gamma::all()->pluck('id');
return [
'name' => Str::slug($this->faker->unique()->realText(50)),
'number' => $this->faker->randomNumber(3),
'beta_id' => $this->faker->randomElement($beta_ids),
'gamma_id' => $this->faker->randomElement($gamma_ids)
];
}
}
If you want to be fancy and create sometimes new entries to relate to:
<?php
namespace Database\Factories;
use App\Models\Alpha;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Factories\Factory;
use Illuminate\Support\Str;
use App\Models\Beta;
class AlphaFactory extends Factory {
protected $model = Alpha::class;
public function definition() {
$beta_id;
$beta_ids = Beta::all()->pluck('id');
if($beta_ids->isEmpty() || $this->faker->boolean($chanceOfGettingTrue = 50)) {
$beta_id = Beta::factory()->create()->id;
} else {
$beta_id = $this->faker->randomElement($beta_ids);
}
return [
'name' => Str::slug($this->faker->unique()->realText(50)),
'number' => $this->faker->randomNumber(3),
'beta_id' => $beta_id
];
}
}
I don't know if this is the right way to do this, but it works for me. If there is a better way, let me know.