How to use Faker from Factory_boy

You can use faker with factory_boy like this:

class RandomUserFactory(factory.Factory):
    class Meta:
        model = models.User

    first_name = factory.Faker('first_name')

user = RandomUserFactory()

print user.first_name
# 'Emily'

So you need to instantiate a user with factory_boy and it will call Faker for you.

I don't know if you are trying to use this with Django or not, but if you want the factory to save the created user to the database, then you need to extend factory.django.DjangoModelFactory instead of factory.Factory.

UPD You should generally prefer one of the two other answers, because this ones uses the private interface, and the generate() solution only works for factory-boy<3.1.0.

A bit simpler way is to use undocumented generate() method (factory-boy<3.1.0):

import factory
print(factory.Faker('random_int').generate({}))

or _get_faker():

print(factory.Faker._get_faker().random_int())

You may check out the other answer for a more detailed example.

I know this is an old question but for anyone who might come across this, here's another approach that you can use.

>>> from factory.faker import faker
>>> FAKE = faker.Faker()
>>> FAKE.name()
'Scott Rodriguez'
>>> FAKE.address()
'PSC 5061, Box 1673\nAPO AP 53007'
>>>

First, if you want to use factory_boy with a Django model, you should use DjangoModelFactory as it is recommended.

Second, factory_boy also suggests to use Faker attribute declaration in order to easily define realistic-looking factories. (see providers)

class RandomUserFactory(factory.DjangoModelFactory):
    class Meta:
        model = 'myapp.User'  # Equivalent to model = myapp.models.User

    first_name = factory.Faker('first_name')

Once you have defined your factory, you can simply use it as follows:

>>> o = RandomUserFactory()
>>> o.first_name
Tim