Seedbank

Seedbank allows you to structure your Rails seed data instead of having it all dumped into one large file. I find my seed data tended to fall into two categories. 1. Stuff that the entire application requires. 2. Stuff to populate my development and staging environments.

Seedbank assumes common seed data is under db/seeds and any directories under db/seeds/ are specific to an environment, so db/seeds/development is contains all your development only seed data.

Example

Seedbank seeds follow this structure;

db/seeds/
  bar.seeds.rb
  develpment/
    users.seeds.rb
  foo.seeds.rb

This would generate the following Rake tasks

rake db:seed                    # Loads the original seeds in db/seeds.rb followed by db/seeds/*.seeds.rb then db/seeds/environment/*.seeds.rb
rake db:seed:bar                # Loads seeds from bar.seeds.rb
rake db:seed:development        # Loads db/seeds.rb, db/seeds/*.seeds.rb and any seeds in db/seeds/development/*.seeds.rb.
rake db:seed:development:users  # Loads seeds from development/users.seeds.rb
rake db:seed:foo                # Loads seeds from foo.seeds.rb
rake db:seed:original           # Load the seed data from db/seeds.rb

Therefor assuming RAILS_ENV is not set or is 'development'

$ rake db:seed

would load the seeds in db/seeds.rb, db/seeds/bar.seeds.rb, db/seeds/foo.seeds/rb and db/seeds/development/users.seeds.rb. Whereas

$ RAILS_ENV=production db:seed

would load the seeds in db/seeds.rb, db/seeds/bar.seeds.rb and db/seeds/foo.seeds/rb

The reason behind Seedbank is laziness. When I checkout or re-visit a project I don't want to mess around getting my environment setup I just want the code and a database loaded with data in a known state. Since the Rails core team were good enough to give us rake db:setup it would be rude not to use it.

rake db:setup  # Create the database, load the schema, and initialize with the seed data (use db:reset to also drop the db first)

To achieve this slothful aim Seedbank renames the original db:seed rake task to db:seed:original, makes it a dependency for all the Seedbank seeds and adds a new db:seed task that loads all the common seeds in db/seeds plus all the seeds for the current Rails environment.

Installation

Rails 3.x

Add the seedbank gem to your Gemfile. In Gemfile:

gem "seedbank"

That's it!

Rails 2.x

Add the seedbank gem to your app. In config/environment.rb:

config.gem 'seedbamk'

Then in the bottom of your applications Rakefile:

Seedbank.load_tasks

Note on Patches/Pull Request