The PHP Faker library is one of those tools that is hugely helpful when developing locally so you can see dummy data, and it covers everything from fake names, to addresses, lorem impsum, and so much more. Today, François Zaninotto the creator of the library announced that after nine years he is sunsetting the library.
In his post, he outlines some of the reasons why he has made this decision including climate change (according to packagist, Faker has been downloaded 121M times. 121M x 3.3 MB = way too many Bytes.) due to the size of it and how it would be better if all the locales were separate, how time-consuming the management of the package is, and how people want to submit copyrighted content in PR’s.
What François has decided to do is leave the package up but put call it complete. Basically, no more development will happen on the fzaninotto/Faker repo, and he is recommending people fork it to take it over.
Since this library is used by so many in the Laravel community, Taylor tweeted that they will ensure Faker continues with a core team of maintainers, and the fork is available at fakerphp/faker. Some of the first steps will be making it PHP 8 compatible so that it works with future versions of PHP.
Until you update your PHP version, you will not need to replace the package with this new one, and in the future, Laravel will more than likely ship with it, so you may not have to make any changes.
Eric is the creator of Laravel News and has been covering Laravel since 2012.
