

- #Generate fake data python how to#
- #Generate fake data python windows 10#
- #Generate fake data python free#
Note that as of this writing there is a known issue in Windows 10 that causes exceptions to occasionally be raised when using the Faker date_time provider.īelow, you can find a python snippet that contains a mapping from each column name to a python lambda function which will generate the columns’ value. As a quick pass, let’s say we’d like to use the following faker providers on each column:įor the columns that don’t have an applicable provider, we’ll handle them ourselves leveraging python’s own random library. Normally, we’d do an analysis of the table to determine which columns are PII and which are not, but in this case, I’d like to be able to generate arbitrary amounts of data for this schema so I’ll need to create a generating function for each column. Once installed, we can start masking individual columns.

#Generate fake data python how to#
Refer to the Faker documentation for more details on how to install Faker, but in short you can run: As you can see, the table contains a variety of sensitive data including names, SSNs, birthdates, and salary information. Our ‘production’ data has the following schema. Our goal will be to generate a new dataset, our synthetic dataset, that looks and feels just like the original data. The data we will use is a table of employees at a fictitious company. We obviously won’t use real data in this article we’ll use data that is already fake but we will pretend it is real. This article, however, will focus entirely on the Python flavor of Faker. It is also available in a variety of other languages such as perl, ruby, and C#. What is Fakerįaker is a python package that generates fake data. To accomplish this, we’ll use Faker, a popular python library for creating fake data. In this article we’ll look at a variety of ways to populate your dev/staging environments with high quality synthetic data that is similar to your production data. Restricting access to high quality data with which to build and test leads to a variety of issues, including making it more difficult to find bugs. If you enjoy using Factory Boy to generate your dummy data, then you also might like incorporating it into your unit tests.New regulations around data privacy and an increasing awareness of the importance of protecting sensitive data is pushing companies to lock down access to their production data. Hopefully this post helps you spin up a lot of fake data for your Django app very quickly. I use adorable.io for dummy profile pics and Picsum or Unsplash for larger pictures like this one.
#Generate fake data python free#
If you need dummy images for your website as well then there are a lot of great free tools online to help. Using the transaction.atomic decorator makes a big difference in the runtime of this script, since it bundles up 100s of queries and submits them in one go. choice ( people ) CommentFactory ( user = commentor, thread = thread ) choice ( people ) thread = ThreadFactory ( creator = creator ) # Create comments for each thread for _ in range ( COMMENTS_PER_THREAD ): commentor = random. add ( * members ) # Create all the threads for _ in range ( NUM_THREADS ): creator = random. choices ( people, k = USERS_PER_CLUB ) club. append ( person ) # Add some users to clubs for _ in range ( NUM_CLUBS ): club = ClubFactory () members = random. write ( "Creating new data." ) # Create all the users people = for _ in range ( NUM_USERS ): person = UserFactory () people. write ( "Deleting old data." ) models = for m in models : m. atomic def handle ( self, * args, ** kwargs ): self. # setup_test_data.py import random from django.db import transaction from import BaseCommand from forum.models import User, Thread, Club, Comment from forum.factories import ( UserFactory, ThreadFactory, ClubFactory, CommentFactory ) NUM_USERS = 50 NUM_CLUBS = 10 NUM_THREADS = 12 COMMENTS_PER_THREAD = 25 USERS_PER_CLUB = 8 class Command ( BaseCommand ): help = "Generates test data". For example, for a user, you would create a factory class as follows: When using Factory Boy you create classes called "factories", which each represent a Django model. Factory Boy can easily be configured to generate random but realistic data like names, emails and paragraphs by internally using the Faker library. It's a library that's built for automated testing, but it also works well for this use-case. We'll be using Factory Boy to generate all our dummy data. ManyToManyField ( User ) Building data with Factory Boy CharField ( max_length = 128 ) member = models. Model ): """A group of users interested in the same thing""" name = models. ForeignKey ( Thread ) class Club ( models. CharField ( max_length = 128 ) poster = models. Model ): """A comment by a user on a thread""" body = models. ForeignKey ( User ) class Comment ( models. CharField ( max_length = 128 ) creator = models. Model ): """A forum comment thread""" title = models. CharField ( max_length = 128 ) class Thread ( models. Model ): """A person who uses the website""" name = models.
