Question

I just deployed my rails app to a Linode VPS, and was wondering what would be the best way of adding records to the DB.

I have tables such as Categories, which I’d like to populate.

I thought of the Taps gem, using a csv, or an sql dump file.

I’d like to know if there are any tools out there for this?

Thanks

Answer 1

For this puporse there are the so called seed file which is default in:

db/seeds.rb

You can add entries here ( there is an example in the seed file ), which you can generate after deployment with a rake task:

rake db:seed

You probably are using bundler as well, so use:

bundle exec rake db:seed

In case of large number of seeds you can always create multiple files, see this blogpost about handling large seed files.

However, if you are in a state, where the already existing data in the app is crucial and you are changing servers or database drivers you wanna take a look on yaml_db gem which gives a nice method to abstract the existing data away from your actual db driver and export it into a .yaml file which you can import later back e.g.: after deploying on a new server.

See Railscast – #179 about seeding.