Fake file maker

[lallenfrancisl]

Clear and concise description of the problem

Currently faker generates fake data. But it does not support generating random filetypes. If I want to seed an s3 folder with documents it's not achievable through faker

Suggested solution

A submodule for generating files. It can be used like this
faker.file.pdf({ size: 4000 })

This can support many other filetypes too, videos and images can be just gaussian noise

Alternative

No response

Additional context

No response

[Shinigami92]

I would say no to this feature request, because it tries to solve a higher order kind of type.
We cannot generate a PDF with content, or would it just contain lorem ipsum?
We already have the image module for images, you could fetch just some of the generated images and download them and serve these as files.
For file types we have the system.mimeType function.

I'm not rejecting your request, but maybe you should define more in depth what you need and why faker should support it instead of that you just wrap a function that use internally faker.

Also we are multiple maintainers, so maybe another maintainer has another opinion about your request 🙂
So I would at least await one additional opinion.

[ST-DDT]

IMO this is a nice feature, but almost impossible to implememt without many large libraries.

I dont think we should add it to our core package.
Maybe we could add it to a future extension package.

Maybe if we limit ourselves to a few very simple filetypes, like txt, md, maybe some images.
PDF might be possible as well, not sure.
Contents would be lorem/image module based.

But then again, I'm not sure whether the contents would satisfy the needs of the users.
Especially since we cannot do some common file formats such as docx.

Lets keep this issue open for further input and suggestions, but dont implement it for now.
(vFuture?)

[lallenfrancisl]

I understand that this is a big feature request (I didn't mean it to be as a demand to implement). But let me try to put some arguments in favour of the feature request here

1. Faker is a fake data generation library and files could be seen as the next thing for data. For text it would be documents, pdfs etc. For example, a lorem ipsum doc.
2. I am assuming a lot of web apps need a way to fake file submissions (atleast I have worked with a lot) In those cases, you don't have to go to a different library.
3. It's a really unique feature which I haven't really seen anywhere properly implemented for variety of filetypes that can be used for ease of use (potentially monetisable)

[lallenfrancisl]

Regarding some implementation ideas, text based files can just have lorem ipsum as the content, image based files can have just gaussian blur or even images from unsplash (this can be a choice given to the user), videos could also follow gaussian blur strategy or random images composed into video using something like ffmpeg or something

[ST-DDT]

If you are interested in this feature, please upvote the issue.