navigatingcancer / seed_dump

Rails 4 task to dump (parts) of your database to db/seeds.rb

Seed Dump

Seed Dump is a Rails 4 plugin that adds a rake task named db:seed:dump.

It allows you to create seed data files from the existing data in your database.

You can also use Seed Dump from the Rails console. See below for usage examples.

Note: if you want to use Seed Dump with Rails 3 or earlier, use version 0.5.3.

Installation

Add it to your Gemfile with:

gem 'seed_dump'

Or install it by hand:

$ gem install seed_dump

Examples

Rake task

Dump all data directly to db/seeds.rb:

$ rake db:seed:dump

Result:

Product.create!([
  {category_id: 1, description: "Long Sleeve Shirt", name: "Long Sleeve Shirt"},
  {category_id: 3, description: "Plain White Tee Shirt", name: "Plain T-Shirt"}
])
User.create!([
  {id: 1, password: "123456", username: "test_1"},
  {id: 2, password: "234567", username: "test_2"}
])

Dump only data from the users table and dump a maximum of 1 record:

$ rake db:seed:dump MODELS=User LIMIT=1

Result:

User.create!([
  {id: 1, password: "123456", username: "test_1"}
])

Append to db/seeds.rb instead of overwriting it:

rake db:seed:dump APPEND=true

Use another output file instead of db/seeds.rb:

rake db:seed:dump FILE=db/seeds/users.rb

There are more options that can be set— see below for all of them.

Console

Output a dump of all User records:

irb(main):001:0> puts SeedDump.dump(User)
User.create!([
  {id: 1, password: "123456", username: "test_1"},
  {id: 2, password: "234567", username: "test_2"}
])

Write the dump to a file:

irb(main):002:0> SeedDump.dump(User, file: 'db/seeds.rb')

Append the dump to a file:

irb(main):003:0> SeedDump.dump(User, file: 'db/seeds.rb', append: true)

Options are specified as a Hash for the second argument.

Options

Options are common to both the Rake task and the console, except where noted.

append: If set to true, append the data to the file instead of overwriting it. Default: false.

batch_size: Controls the number of records that are written to file at a given time. Default: 1000. If you're running out of memory when dumping, try decreasing this. If things are dumping too slow, trying increasing this.

exclude: Attributes to be excluded from the dump. Default: id, created_at, updated_at. If you need to include these columns pass "EXCLUDE=" as empty and the columns will be included.

file: Write to the specified output file. Default in Rake task is db/seeds.rb. Console returns the dump as a string by default.

limit: Dump no more than this amount of data. Default: no limit. Rake task only. In the console just pass in an ActiveRecord::Relation with the appropriate limit (e.g. SeedDump.dump(User.limit(5))).

model[s]: Restrict the dump to the specified comma-separated list of models. Default: all models. If you are using a Rails engine you can dump a specific model by passing "EngineName::ModelName". Rake task only.

Running Tests

bundle exec rake spec