Split your database seeds.rb by Rails environment

By default, Rails seeding is very limited. All you get is a single seeds.rb file (which suggests that everything should just go in there).

But in many cases, that’s a terrible idea! What if you want to seed your development environment with huge amounts of test data? Or what if you have some seed data that only makes sense to run in production? You’re going to want to split your seeds.rb somehow.

Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to do that! Since seeds.rb is just a Ruby file, we can write simple code to load different files depending on the RAILS_ENV environment variable.

I show you how to do that in this article. It’s really simple to do, and instantly makes your seeding a lot more powerful.

→ 🌰 Advanced Database Seeding in Rails (honesw.com)

This is a short article linking to a couple of interesting seeding resources. The thing I found most interesting was the Seedbank gem, which lets you build nested seeds like db/seeds/extra/dog.rb. Then you can run them with rails db:seed:extra:dog.

Plus, there’s a second interesting gem (seed_dump), and a basic version of the seed splitting technique that I covered in my article.

→ 🐌 Fixing slow seeds with upsert_all (railsnotes.xyz)

If you’re struggling with slow seeds, this will help you speed them up... a lot. I show you how to seed 10x faster by optimizing your SQL INSERT calls (this is part of a longer article I wrote on seeding with the faker gem, which I featured in issue 3 of this newsletter).

By using upsert_all to INSERT all our records in a single transaction, we cut seeding time for 10,000 records down from 7.5 seconds, to 0.8 seconds 🤯.

→ 🧹 Multiple Seed Files + a Rake task (stackoverflow.com)

This is a great StackOverflow thread with a more advanced way to split your seed files. Rather than just splitting based on RAILS_ENV, this method let’s you create arbitrary seed files and then run them with rake db:seed:seed_file_name.

Super handy if you want more control over your seed files, and it’s pretty simple too! Just a short rake task, and you’re good to go.

# load the correct seeds file for our Rails environment
# need db/seeds/development.rb, test.rb, production.rb
#

# get the current environment
rails_env = "#{Rails.env.downcase}.rb"

# load the right seed file
load(Rails.root.join( 'db', 'seeds', rails_env))