Inserting default "admin" user into database during Rails App startup

Question

I'm building my first real rails application for a little in-house task. Most of the application tasks require authentication/authorization. The first time the app starts up (or starts with a wiped db), I'd like the process to be:

1. User logs into the admin panel using "admin" & "admin" for authentication info.

2. User navigates to admin credentials editing page and changes name and password to something safer so that "admin" & "admin" is no longer a valid login.

To achieve this result, I'd like to stuff a default username & password combination into the database on if the application starts up and detects that there are no user credentials in the 'users' table. For example:

if User.count == 0
  User.create(:name => "admin", :password => "admin")
end

However, I'm unsure where to place that code. I tried adding an initializer script in the config/initializers, but the error I received appeared to indicate that the model classes weren't yet loaded into the application. So I'm curious to know at what point I can hook into the application startup cycle and insert data into the database through ActiveRecord before requests are dispatched.

[EDIT] I should have mentioned that I'm using Rails 3.0--prerelease and Ruby 1.9.2-HEAD.

Answer 1

Use seed data. Run rake db:setup to create the databases, load the schema, and load the seed data. Or, if the database has already been set up, you can just run rake db:seed to just load the seed data.