Dibber
A set of tools to tidy up rails seeds.rb files.
Dibber has two compoments:
Seeder
Seeder is designed to simplify the process of pulling attributes from YAML files, and populating ActiveRecord objects with those attributes.
ProcessLog
ProcessLog provides Seeder with a simple before and after reporting tool.
Installation
Add this to your Gemfile:
gem 'dibber'
Rails Examples
You have a rails app with a Thing model, and you want to seed it with some things. Thing instances have the attributes ‘name’, ‘colour’, ‘size’. You have a YAML file ‘db/seeds/things.yml’ that looks like this:
foo:
colour: red
size: large
bar:
colour: blue
size: small
Add this to your ‘db/seeds.rb’
Seeder = Dibber::Seeder
Seeder.seed :thing
puts Seeder.report
Then run ‘rake db:seed’
Seeder will create two new things.
You’ll then be able to do this:
thing = Thing.find_by_name(:foo)
thing.colour ---> 'red'
Outside Rails
Dibber can be used outside of Rails, but in this case you will need to specify the location of the seed files.
Seeder.seeds_path = "some/path/to/seeds"
You can also use this technique in Rails if you want to put your seed files in an alternative folder to ‘db/seeds’
Report
Seeder.report outputs a report detailing start and end time, and a log of how the number of things has changed
Overwriting existing entries
Seeder#build will not overwrite existing data unless directed to do so.
thing.update_attribute(:colour, 'black')
Seeder.seed :thing
thing.reload.colour ----> 'black'
Seeder.seed(:thing, :overwrite => true).build
thing.reload.colour ----> 'red'
Using alternative class and field name mappings
Seeder.seed calls Seeder#build to build the objects defined in the seed files. You can call the build method directly if your seed file names do not match the class name:
Seeder.new(Thing, 'other_things.yml').build
More examples
Take a look at test/examples/seeds.rb for some more usage examples.
If you clone this app, you can run this example at the project root:
ruby test/examples/seeds.rb
There is also an example of process log usage:
ruby test/examples/process_logs.rb