You can use attach()
or sync()
method on a many-to-many relationship.
There are multiple ways you can approach this. Here one of them:
// Populate roles
factory(App\Role::class, 20)->create();
// Populate users
factory(App\User::class, 50)->create();
// Get all the roles attaching up to 3 random roles to each user
$roles = App\Role::all();
// Populate the pivot table
App\User::all()->each(function ($user) use ($roles) {
$user->roles()->attach(
$roles->random(rand(1, 3))->pluck('id')->toArray()
);
});