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Description

Seed Fu is an attempt to once and for all solve the problem of inserting and maintaining seed data in a database. It uses a variety of techniques gathered from various places around the web and combines them to create what is hopefully the most robust seed data system around.

Code Quality Rank: L5
Monthly Downloads: 551,905
Programming language: Ruby
License: MIT License
Tags: Database Tools    
Latest version: v2.3.9

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README

Seed Fu

Seed Fu is an attempt to once and for all solve the problem of inserting and maintaining seed data in a database. It uses a variety of techniques gathered from various places around the web and combines them to create what is hopefully the most robust seed data system around.

Warning: API Changes

Version 2.0.0 of Seed Fu introduced API changes. Seed::Writer was been completely overhauled and will require you to update your scripts. Some other deprecations were introduced, and support is fully removed in version 2.1.0. Please see the [CHANGELOG](CHANGELOG.md) for details.

The API documentation is available in full at http://rubydoc.info/github/mbleigh/seed-fu/master/frames.

Basic Example

In 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 load the data:

$ rake db:seed_fu
== Seed from /path/to/app/db/fixtures/users.rb
 - User {:id=>1, :login=>"jon", :email=>"[email protected]", :name=>"Jon"}
 - User {:id=>2, :login=>"emily", :email=>"[email protected]", :name=>"Emily"}

Installation

Rails 3.1, 3.2, 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 5.0

Just add gem 'seed-fu', '~> 2.3' to your Gemfile

Seed Fu depends on Active Record, but doesn't have to be used with a full Rails app. Simply load and require the seed-fu gem and you're set.

Rails 3.0

The current version is not backwards compatible with Rails 3.0. Please use gem 'seed-fu', '~> 2.0.0'.

Rails 2.3

The current version is not backwards compatible with Rails 2.3. Please use gem 'seed-fu', '~> 1.2.0'.

Constraints

Constraints are used to identify seeds, so that they can be updated if necessary. For example:

Point.seed(:x, :y) do |s|
  s.x = 4
  s.y = 7
  s.name = "Home"
end

The first time this seed is loaded, a Point record will be created. Now suppose the name is changed:

Point.seed(:x, :y) do |s|
  s.x = 4
  s.y = 7
  s.name = "Work"
end

When this is run, Seed Fu will look for a Point based on the :x and :y constraints provided. It will see that a matching Point already exists and so update its attributes rather than create a new record.

If you do not want seeds to be updated after they have been created, use seed_once:

Point.seed_once(:x, :y) do |s|
  s.x = 4
  s.y = 7
  s.name = "Home"
end

The default constraint just checks the id of the record.

Where to put seed files

By default, seed files are looked for in the following locations:

  • #{Rails.root}/db/fixtures and #{Rails.root}/db/fixtures/#{Rails.env} in a Rails app
  • ./db/fixtures when loaded without Rails

You can change these defaults by modifying the SeedFu.fixture_paths array.

Seed files can be named whatever you like, and are loaded in alphabetical order.

Terser syntax

When loading lots of records, the above block-based syntax can be quite verbose. You can use the following instead:

User.seed(:id,
  { :id => 1, :login => "jon",   :email => "[email protected]",   :name => "Jon"   },
  { :id => 2, :login => "emily", :email => "[email protected]", :name => "Emily" }
)

Rake task

Seed files can be run automatically using rake db:seed_fu. There are two options which you can pass:

  • rake db:seed_fu FIXTURE_PATH=path/to/fixtures -- Where to find the fixtures
  • rake db:seed_fu FILTER=users,articles -- Only run seed files with a filename matching the FILTER

You can also do a similar thing in your code by calling SeedFu.seed(fixture_paths, filter).

Disable output

To disable output from Seed Fu, set SeedFu.quiet = true.

Handling large seed files

Seed files can be huge. To handle large files (over a million rows), try these tricks:

  • Gzip your fixtures. Seed Fu will read .rb.gz files happily. gzip -9 gives the best compression, and with Seed Fu's repetitive syntax, a 160M file can shrink to 16M.
  • Add lines reading # BREAK EVAL in your big fixtures, and Seed Fu will avoid loading the whole file into memory. If you use SeedFu::Writer, these breaks are built into your generated fixtures.
  • Load a single fixture at a time with the FILTER environment variable
  • If you don't need Seed Fu's ability to update seed with new data, then you may find that activerecord-import is faster

Generating seed files

If you need to programmatically generate seed files, for example to convert a CSV file into a seed file, then you can use [SeedFu::Writer](lib/seed-fu/writer.rb).

Capistrano deployment

SeedFu has included Capistrano [deploy script](lib/seed-fu/capistrano.rb), you just need require that in config/deploy.rb:

require 'seed-fu/capistrano'

# Trigger the task after update_code
after 'deploy:update_code', 'db:seed_fu'

If you use Capistrano3, you should require another file.

require 'seed-fu/capistrano3'

# Trigger the task before publishing
before 'deploy:publishing', 'db:seed_fu'

Bugs / Feature requests

Please report them on Github Issues.

Contributors

Copyright © 2008-2010 Michael Bleigh, released under the MIT license


*Note that all licence references and agreements mentioned in the Seed Fu README section above are relevant to that project's source code only.