API for creating random users in your application

http://randomuser.me/

by aram • 13 years ago

95 36 13 years ago

randomuser.me

BetaCygni• 13 years ago

Isn't parsing the JSON and converting to your own data format more work than just generating random users yourself?

chrisbridgett2• 13 years ago

Doesn't seem like much work at all to me, compared to creating random users.

Then again, maybe it's just me that isn't creative enough to be able to come up with names other than "Test User", "Another User", "Somebody Else", etc. :-p

gog• 13 years ago

There is a library called Faker that can do this for you. It exists for perl, ruby, php and probably other languages.

I am interested in where do this pictures come from? Did these people give their permission to be used like this?

aram3• 13 years ago

I don't think so; it's pretty trivial to decode the JSON and make it a native object/array/whatever in almost any programming language.

So far I always did a "user[count]" or "user[timestamp]" thing and it was time consuming, dull and most of all didn't do the best job at presenting the app to the clients.

hk__2• 13 years ago

For simple placeholders you can use a client-side templates engine and pass it the JSON directly.

martin-adams2• 13 years ago

Beyond 3 or 4 fake users, I think you'll soon realise how difficult it can be to be a) motivated, and b) original.

chrisbridgett2• 13 years ago

Neat little API. Would be cool if there were a way to generate users with a particular locale - e.g. so I could generate UK users with UK addresses, telephone numbers, etc.

rhizome2• 13 years ago

Nasty negative left margin.

aram3• 13 years ago

It looks fine on my end; what browser/OS are you using?

rhizome2• 13 years ago

Android Chrome.

Chetane• 13 years ago

Cool idea! Btw, your Ajax code snippet won't work, 'return' is a reserved keyword :) I would suggest using 'data' or 'response' instead for your variable name.

jokull• 13 years ago

Very cool! Limited to US only though. Check out behindthename.com/api/ if you need country distribution. Had to map country codes to groups of names. Let me know if you need this data. I’ve got some scripts to generate random users, although not address or picture data.

jlebrech• 13 years ago

cool, I could make a dating site with this ;)

C1D2• 13 years ago

Even though the pictures are under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 I do feel right using them and it seems like a lot of work to parse the data into your own website, there are server side libraries that can do this for you.

patio11• 13 years ago

So a lesson from when I was young and stupid: If you make fake data, it's often advantageous to make it obviously fake data. If, in a fit of boredom, you decide to do something clever and e.g. generate plausible names and birthdates for fake students by using government lists for the most common names and surnames for people born that year, and you e.g. hypothetically leave 6 pages of no-actual-human-involved fake data sitting on an office printer, you might hypothetically end up in a very awkward conversation with the local person in charge of regulated data breaches.

masklinn• 13 years ago

So a lesson from when I was young and stupid: If you make fake data, it's often advantageous to make it obviously fake data.

A second one: if you make fake data, it's aways advantageous to make it edge-case fake data. Your generator should break more or less every falsehood programmers believe about names[0]

[0] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

mkenyon• 13 years ago

Masklinn, I have to point out that patio11 wrote the article to which you linked!

w3pm2• 13 years ago

Fair enough, but it's also advantageous to make it non-obviously fake. Consider the recent stories about services faking traffic/users in order to gain real traffic/users (ebay, reddit, dating sites, etc).

lazerwalker• 13 years ago

You have a very fair point, but it's tangential to the one patio11 is making; creating testing data for development purposes (that's never going to be seen by users, short of an accident) and creating faked data for marketing/growth/etc purposes (which is solely for the purpose of presenting to users) are unrelated.

um304• 13 years ago

gender: "male", name: { title: "mrs", first: "james", last: "ramirez" },

Never knew "mrs" can be used as a male title.

polymatter• 13 years ago

Never assume anything about names. Never attempt to validate them. It is probably a good edge case (depending on the system in question).

I think a sibling comment has mentioned this, but it deserves repeating (http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...)

Aarvay• 13 years ago

I use Faker :) http://faker.rubyforge.org/

rabino• 13 years ago

Or the PHP port which is awesome: https://github.com/fzaninotto/Faker

aram3• 13 years ago

Disclaimer: I'm not the creator and I'm not associated in any way with the project. Just found it interesting and posted here.

paulnechifor• 13 years ago

I did a similar thing for Romanian identities [1]. Then I discovered that some are way more extensive [2] [3].

[1] http://minimul.ro/identitate-falsa

[2] http://fakenamegenerator.com

[3] http://www.datafakegenerator.com/generador.php

martin-adams2• 13 years ago

Very nice idea. Anyone know of an equivalent for fake e-commerce product data?

andyhmltn2• 13 years ago

On the example, it displays the gender as male and the title as 'mrs' - Is this a typo or an actual response?

andyhmltn2• 13 years ago

Just to help: The title isn't being updated on the ajax call :-) Everything else is so 50% of the time it's correct 50% it's wrong haha

theandym• 13 years ago

For Rails Rumble last year I created a Rails app for generating test data in various formats. It definitely isn't as polished as this (only had 48 hours), but allows for the user to specify their own format. After the competition I cleaned it up a bit more and converted the data generation functionality into a standalone Ruby gem. I'd appreciate any feedback...

App: http://proglipsum.com/

Gem: https://github.com/theandym/mannequin

emeraldd• 13 years ago

Huh, it looks like the api is ignoring the gender option entirely. It seems to return a random gender no matter what the value of the gender parameter ....

cdcarter• 13 years ago

Providing an md5 hash of the example password is just asking for bad password models in new apps! Users, don't use the provided hashes, instead run the user and password through the exact sign-up method real user data will go through.

nirmel• 13 years ago

all users are caucasian middle-aged people with anglo names? that's not so random.

ismaelc• 13 years ago

Test console for easy testing - https://www.mashape.com/community/random-user-generator#!doc...

pdq• 13 years ago

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API for creating random users in your application

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