Laravel record being deleted when calling Factory - php

Question

I have two tables - Roles and Users. Inside of Roles, I have a single record.
{
id: 1, name: Employee, timestamps: blahblah
}
The strange thing is, whenever I call my User factory (which has a foreign key for field role_id) it deletes the record in the Roles table. It also fails the creation of the factory instantiation, saying that the role_id foreign key constraint fails. I have no idea why this is happening.
Here is the code for the user factory. I've hardcoded values until I can figure it out.
$factory->define(App\User::class, function (Faker $faker) {
return [
'name' => $faker->name,
'email' => $faker->unique()->safeEmail,
'email_verified_at' => now(),
'password' => Hash::make("12341234"),
'remember_token' => str_random(10),
'company_id' => 1,
'role_id' => 1,
];
});
And the error:
Doctrine\DBAL\Driver\PDOException: SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity
constraint violation: 1452 Cannot add or update a child row: a foreign
key constraint fails (app.users, CONSTRAINT
users_role_id_foreign FOREIGN KEY (role_id) REFERENCES roles
(id))
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Your foreign key validation seems to be the issue as you error says.
The given context your role_id seems to be the foreign key and you are just passing an arbitrary value which you will never work.
To resolve you will have to create a factory Method that creates a new role and do the following
$factory->define(App\User::class, function (Faker $faker) {
return [
'name' => $faker->name,
'email' => $faker->unique()->safeEmail,
'email_verified_at' => now(),
'password' => Hash::make("12341234"),
'remember_token' => str_random(10),
'company_id' => 1,
'role_id' => factory(Role::class)->create()->id,
];
});
PS make sure your mass assignment includes role_id

Answer 2

While I wasn't able to figure out the exact weirdness associated with this, I believe it to be related to the database configuration for PHPUnit. I added the following lines to my phpunit.xml which resolved the issue.
It's also worth mentioning that the role entity was being deleted because the test was using RefreshDatabase.
<env name="DB_CONNECTION" value="sqlite" />
<env name="DB_DATABASE" value=":memory:" />