Seed is 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.
4. Run rake db:seed to seed your database.
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 <tt>rake db:seeds:generate</tt>. 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).
Run rake db:seed and voila! A seeded database!
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