Seeding

The principle

A country-data package should do exactly two things:

1. Create the tables — handled by the migrations that auto-load on php artisan migrate.
2. Keep the rows in sync — handled by a single master seeder that's safe to re-run on every deploy.

The master seeder

Call it from your application's database/seeders/DatabaseSeeder.php:

use Aaix\LaravelCountries\Database\Seeders\DatabaseSeeder as CountriesSeeder;

class DatabaseSeeder extends Seeder
{
    public function run(): void
    {
        $this->call(CountriesSeeder::class);
        // your own seeders here
    }
}

Then run:

php artisan db:seed

Or target it specifically:

php artisan db:seed --class="Aaix\\LaravelCountries\\Database\\Seeders\\DatabaseSeeder"

What gets seeded

In order:

Step	Seeder	Rows written
1	RegionsSeeder	5 regions + 5 EN translations
2	245 country seeders (AD_Andorra → ZW_Zimbabwe)	245 countries + 1 EN translation each, plus 1 row in extras, coordinates, geographical per country
3	8 language seeders (ar, de, es, fr, it, nl, pt, ru)	245 translations per locale (≈ 1,960 additional rows)
4	NativeNamesSeeder	Updates native_name on all 245 countries

Idempotency guarantees

Every single write is a Model::updateOrCreate([...key...], [...values...]) — keyed on:

• ISO alpha-2 (for countries)
• (lc_country_id, locale) or (lc_region_id, locale) (for translations)
• lc_country_id (for one-to-one sidecars: extras, coordinates)

Re-running the seeder on a fresh DB creates rows. Re-running it on a populated DB updates existing rows in place. Primary keys stay stable, so foreign keys in your own tables that reference country IDs keep pointing to the right row.

The one exception is CountryGeographical (GeoJSON features), which is delete-then-create per country — so geometry changes propagate cleanly.

Running in deploy pipelines

php artisan db:seed --no-interaction --class="Aaix\\LaravelCountries\\Database\\Seeders\\DatabaseSeeder" works well in CI. Add it to your deploy hook if you want country data to stay in sync with the package version automatically.

Native names

native_name (the country's name in its own primary language — "Deutschland", "日本", "Россия") lives on the main lc_countries table, populated by the separate NativeNamesSeeder. Keeping it in its own seeder lets native-name data be maintained independently of the per-country seeders.

Languages

All 9 supported languages are seeded by default — there's no opt-in. If you need to disable languages you don't use, filter after seeding:

CountryTranslation::whereNotIn('locale', ['en', 'de'])->delete();

This runs safely because uniqueness constraints are (lc_country_id, locale), and re-running the seeder would just re-create the missing translations. If you need the deletion to be persistent, run it after every seed.