Question

In my app I have a table for ROLES. Pretty simple:
1: Admin, DESC stuff
2: Guest, Desc stuff

etc..

The issue I just got hit with was I went to deploy the app on heroku and everything broke, reason was that these default roles in the database were not populated on deployment… Something I hadn’t thought about.

With Rails 3, is there a way to say, hello Mr Rails, here are the table’s default values? on migrate or database create?

Thanks

Answer 1

There is a concept called Seed Data in Rails which you can use to do this.

There is a file called seeds.rb is created in the db directory. In which you can create such things.

So for example

 Role.create(:name => "Administrator") 

will go into this file.

You can call rake db:seed to seed this data into your application.

There is a railscast about this as well – http://railscasts.com/episodes/179-seed-data.