Rake task to add default data

Question

I have seen some apps that have a few rake tasks included to load data. I am not talking about seed data, I know about db/seeds.rb, instead I am referring to data such as default users and basic records that help me fill my application with something to look at. I don't want to use db:fixtures:load because I don't have any control over this...

I would like to have rake tasks like this:

rake myapp:data:delete
rake myapp:data:load
rake myapp:data:reload

Where the 'delete' rake task would delete all data that I specify in the rake task, the 'load' app will load the default data from the task into the app and the 'reload' task will delete all data, then load it in the app. How do I do something like this?

If you could give me an example where I have a model named 'Contact' and a few fields - basically how to add or delete data from those fields in a rake task, I would REALLY appreciate it!

Just to give you an idea, I would mainly use these rake tasks when I move from one computer to another to do development. I don't want to manually go enter default records (such as my user to login with) so I could just do rake myapp:data:reload - this would be after doing rake db:schema:load

Thank you,

BN

Answer 1

Create a file lib/tasks/data.rake and write the following code:

require File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__), '../../config/environment')
require 'database_cleaner'

namespace :myapp do
  namespace :data do

    task :delete do
      DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
      DatabaseCleaner.clean
    end

    task :load do
      require 'db/data.rb'
    end

    task :reload do
      Rake::Task['myapp:data:delete'].invoke
      Rake::Task['myapp:data:load'].invoke
    end

  end
end

So now you have defined your rake tasks. I'm using the gem database_cleaner, so you'll need to install it:

sudo gem install database_cleaner

Now, the rake myapp:data:load is basically loading the data from a file called db/data.rb. You could name it anything you wanted as long as you used the file name in the rake task or you could use more than one file if you wanted... So create the file db/data.rb and put all the code that you need...

User.create(...)