I’d like to introduce the convenient seed-fu gem that makes adding and managing seed data easy in Ruby on Rails.

• mbleigh/seed-fu: Advanced seed data handling for Rails, combining the best practices of several methods together.
• seed-fu | RubyGems.org | your community gem host

The usage is to create files like users.rb under db/fixtures, and write them simply like this:

db/fixtures/users.rb

User.seed do |s|
  s.id    = 1
  s.login = "jon"
  s.email = "[email protected]"
  s.name  = "Jon"
end

User.seed do |s|
  s.id    = 2
  s.login = "emily"
  s.email = "[email protected]"
  s.name  = "Emily"
end

To import from all seed files, simply run:

rake db:seed_fu

To load by file or model, run rake tasks like this:

rake db:seed_fu FIXTURE_PATH=path/to/fixtures
rake db:seed_fu FILTER=users,articles

Since you can write Ruby code, you can also write things like importing from CSV to DB:

db/fixtures/users.rb

require 'csv'

csv = CSV.read('db/fixtures/users_master.csv')

csv.each_with_index do |user, i|
  # skip a label row
  next if i === 0

  name = user[0]
  age  = user[1].to_i

  User.seed do |s|
    s.id   = i
    s.name = name
    s.age  = age
  end
end

It’s subtly convenient.

Reference Information

• seed-fuで始める効率的なRails Seed管理 - 酒と泪とRubyとRailsと

That’s all from the Gemba.