How (and whether) to populate rails application with initial data

Question

I\'ve got a rails application where users have to log in. Therefore in order for the application to be usable, there must be one initial user in the system for the first pe

Answer 1

Try a rake task. For example:

1. Create the file /lib/tasks/bootstrap.rake
2. In the file, add a task to create your default user:

    namespace :bootstrap do
      desc "Add the default user"
      task :default_user => :environment do
        User.create( :name => 'default', :password => 'password' )
      end

      desc "Create the default comment"
      task :default_comment => :environment do
        Comment.create( :title => 'Title', :body => 'First post!' )
      end

      desc "Run all bootstrapping tasks"
      task :all => [:default_user, :default_comment]
    end

3. Then, when you're setting up your app for the first time, you can do rake db:migrate OR rake db:schema:load, and then do rake bootstrap:all.