Seed

A plugin to help with generating and/or inserting seed data into your database. Seed will
generate data for you or load it from fixtures or arbitrary Yaml, CSV, or (eventually) XML
files. The basic workflow goes like this:

1. Create seed files. These live in db/seeds/ and are named for the tables of your models,
   like +Person+ (model), +people+ (table) would yield +people_seed.rb+.

2. Create a class named for the file (+people_seed.rb+ would have +PeopleSeed+) that inherits from
   +Seed::Planter+.

3. Fill in your directives for attributes or file loads, or you can leave it empty and Seed will
   enumerate your columns and generate data for you.

You can also generate static versions of the seeds for your current models using the db:seeds:generate
Rake task.

So, let’s say you have a model +User+, with attributes +username+ (string), +password+ (string),
+email_address+ (string), favorite_quote (string), and administrator (boolean). To get a basic seed
file, you need to execute rake db:seeds:generate. This task will yield a file like this:

class UsersSeed < Seed::Planter
  attribute :username, :string
  attribute :password, :string
  attribute :email_address, :string
  attribute :favorite_quote, :string
  attribute :adminstrator, :boolean
end

Now, since we have a few special fields, we can use Seed’s special types for +username+, +password+, and +email_address+.

class UsersSeed < Seed::Planter
  attribute :username, :username
  attribute :password, :password
  attribute :email_address, :email
  attribute :favorite_quote, :string
  attribute :adminstrator, :boolean
end

This will generate proper data (for example, “jmcanally” rather than “Lorem ispum dolormet” for username).

You can also skip specifying a type and provide the data for the field in a +Proc+. For example, if you wanted to
have some specialized logic for setting the value of a field:

class JobsSeed < Seed::Planter
  attribute :description, :string
  attribute :script, Proc { ['upload', 'update', 'find_files'].sort { rand(3) - 1 }[0] }
end

You can also call methods from the seed class in the +Proc+ if you’d like (direct support for method class on the
seed class will be added soon).

Examples

# db/seeds/products_seed.rb
class ProductsSeed < Seed::Planter
  attribute :name, :string
  
  # Address attribute types are special and generate
  # proper data.
  attribute :address, :address
  
  attribute :email, proc { "[email protected]" }      
end

# db/seeds/people_seed.rb
class PeopleSeed < Seed::Planter
  # Tells Seed that you want to load seed data from
  # the file db/seeds/people.yml
  loads_from "people.yml"
end

# db/seeds/things_seed.rb
class ThingsSeed < Seed::Planter
  # Tells Seed that you want to load seed data from
  # the fixtures file (test/fixtures/things.yml)
  loads_from :fixtures
end

Copyright © 2008 Jeremy McAnally, released under the MIT license