Class attribute for overriding factory class

[christopherarter]

Hey all!

I had an idea for a PR and curious if there's any interest / appetite for it. It's very common for me to have models in custom namespaces, e.g. App\SomeFeatureDomain\Models\SomeModel and in that scenario, I have to explicitly write a newFactory() static method on each model. This is a PR that would introduce an Eloquent attribute as a shorthand.

<?php
use Database\Factories\CommentFactory;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Relations\HasMany;
use Illuminate\Database\Eloquent\Attributes\UseFactory;

#[UseFactory(CommentFactory::class)]
class Comment extends Model
{
    use HasFactory;
// ...
}

I have this working well on a local branch and curious if it's worth finishing up with tests & raising a PR?

[bulletproof-coding]

Hi. Attributes are read/processed/compiled at run time not at compile time in php. I know Laravel embraced them because octane can handle them fast. But they don't have ctrl click and so on in IDE. This is my opinion about them: #52193

[shaedrich]

Give people choices—go for it 👍🏻